1. The 6 Laws Of Customer Experience. Every executive should understand these fundamental drivers of how organizations deliver customer experience.
2. The Four Core Customer Experience Core Competencies. The path to customer-centricity requires mastering these four competencies: Purposeful Leadership, Compelling Brand Values, Employee Engagement, and Customer Connectedness. The report also has a self-assessment tool that execs can use to gauge their organization.
3. My Customer Experience Manifesto Continues. Provides a perspective of how to think about customer experience management.
4. Customer Experience-Loyalty Connection. This report uses large-scale consumer research to show the link between customer experience and customer loyalty, good for understanding ROI.
5. What If Customer Experience Has No ROI?. This is a three-part post that explains he connection between customer experience and business results.
6. Customer Experience Affects Attitudes And Behaviors. Shows how customer experience links to business and brand strategy.
7. Three Characteristics Of Transformational Leaders identifies that elements that leaders need if they want to drive change int heir organizations.
8. Improve “Purposeful Leadership” In 2011. Gain a deeper understanding of the role that leadership plays in transforming customer experience.
9. The 8 Signs Of Executive Commitment. Gauge the commitment level of the executive team with this simple diagnostic.
10. The Customer Experience Checklist Manifesto. Use this checklist of eight items to make sure that investments will improve customer experience.
11. 8 Customer Experience Trends For 2011. These trends give a good sense of where things are heading, but key an eye out for an updated list of megatrends.

If you can get your senior executives to spend 60 minutes reading through this material, then they should have a much better understanding about what it takes to build a more customer-centric organization. If they show some interest, then I would also sign them up for the monthly CX Journal so they can continue on their learning journey.

The bottom line: An informed senior executive is a critical CX asset.

Obviously Apple is not the only large organization that isn’t setup to improve or sustain its relationships with customers; it’s true of most companies. So this letter could have been addressed to just about any CEO, but I knew that a note to Apple would get more people’s attention.

The bottom line: Customer loyalty is a sustainable asset

Purchase data snapshot for $195

We just published a new Temkin Group Data Snapshot: Social Media and Mobile Adoption that provides details of how often U.S. consumers do a number of social media and mobile activities. Here’s the description of the research:

As part of Temkin Group’s Q4 2011 Consumer Benchmark Survey, we asked 5,000 U.S. consumers about their social media and mobile activities. This data snapshot looks at how many consumers perform activities such as update their status on Facebook, send a tweet, read an online product review, or invite someone to join their LinkedIn network. The data also shows how frequently they do these activities and the differences across seven age groups of consumers.

The data snapshot if full of facts and figures. Here are a handful of factoids that I pulled together from the report:

The data snapshot has 13 data-rich graphics. Here’s a partial view from two of the figures:

Purchase data snapshot for $195

The bottom line: Social medial and mobile adoption differs widely across age.

We introduced the Temkin Ratings site in the US last year. The site provides free access to all of our ratings, making it easy to see how consumers rate large companies across a number of dimensions. We decided to extend the Temkin Ratings into the UK with four of our ratings: Experience, Loyalty, Trust, and Forgiveness. You can review all of those ratings from the Temkin Ratings UK site.

As you can see below, we’re also providing the Temkin Experience Ratings report free of charge. We will providing some details around the other ratings in future posts. And, of course, we will be releasing the 2012 ratings in the US later this year — with even more industries.

The report can be downloaded for free

We just published a new Temkin Group report, 2012 Temkin Experience Ratings UK. Congratulations to the top six companies (out of 66 in the ratings):

1) John Lewis
1) Waitrose
3) Amazon.co.uk
4) Farmfoods
4) Iceland
4) Morrisons

Here is the executive summary from the report:

John Lewis and Waitrose tied for first in the 2012 Temkin Experience Rankings UK, with several other grocery stores and Amazon.com rounding out the top ten. We asked 3,000 British consumers to rate their recent interactions with companies across three dimensions of their experience: functional, accessible, and emotional. These data allowed us to rate 66 companies across seven industries. Only two of those companies received an “excellent” rating, while 26% fell in the “good” category. The results show that retailers and grocery stores deliver the best experience while personal computer manufacturers and insurance companies provide the worst.

The Temkin Experience Ratings UK are based on evaluating three elements of experience:

1. Functional: How well do experiences meet consumers’ needs?
2. Accessible: How easy is it for consumers to do what they want to do?
3. Emotional: How do consumers feel about the experiences?

Here are the ratings for all 66 companies:

The report can be downloaded for FREE

Are you interested in getting a deeper look at the data? Or do you want to see the differences in industries across age? Then you should visit Temkin Ratings at www.temkinratings.co.uk.

The bottom line: Customer experience excellence is in short supply.

• CX Metrics Ignorers (45%): These companies don’t use CX metrics in any substantial way.
• CX Metrics Reviewers (16%): These companies review metrics but don’t do too much with the information.
• CX Metrics Toe Dippers (14%): These companies make some decisions using CX metrics, but the metrics aren’t part of the ongoing operations.
• CX Metrics Decision Makers (25%): These companies use CX metrics to guide how they run their business.

The bottom line: How do YOU use CX metrics?

To prepare the updated list of megatrends, we’ve been doing a bunch of research which includes reading through responses from more than 300 CX professionals who recently answered our survey question: What trends do you think will have a significant effect on customer experience over the next few years? 

Here’s the initial draft of 13 CX Megatrends. As you’ll see, there are a few carryovers from the previous list. I’ve also taken some creative license to introduce new words.

Is there something missing? Do these make sense? How do you think the future of CX will play out?

The bottom line: We want to hear from you

The report is available for FREE

We just published a new piece of research, Who Prefers Service Over Price?

This report uses a new format for Temkin Group that we call a “Data Snapshot.” While many of our reports have a lot of data, these reports will be even more data intense and can serve as reference materials for looking up data points. Since this is the first report in the new format, we decided to make it available for free.

Here’s the executive summary:

We asked 5,000 U.S. consumers whether they would prefer low prices or good service when doing business with 14 types of companies. It turns out that consumers prefer low prices in every industry except for banks and computers. Our analysis looked at differences across age, income, ethnic, and educational levels of consumers. Some of our findings: life insurance is the most age-dependent, low income leads to price preference, blacks have the most preference for good service, and higher education leads to a preference for service.

This Data Snapshot has five graphics that look at the following data (which is the first figure in the snapshot) across age, income, ethnic, and educational demographics.

The report is available for FREE

The bottom line: Low prices are important, but many people prefer good service

My take: As you can see, only about half of respondents think they’re doing a good job collecting and communicating CX metrics — and that’s the most effective thing that they’re doing. Less than one out of five think they’re good at making trade-offs between financial and CX metrics.

What does that mean? Even companies that are measuring their customer experience aren’t able to use this information effectively to sway decisions. So short-term financial metrics continue to set the course for most companies.

It doesn’t make sense to ignore financial metrics, but companies need to do a better job of balancing them with CX metrics. While financial metrics often look at historical performance, CX metrics can give a better sense of the future. So companies should build up their confidence in CX metrics so that decisions are made based on an explicit analysis of short-term and long-term goals.

The bottom line: CX metrics need to guide business decisions

A lot of the credit has to go to Samuel J. Palmisano, who just stepped down as IBM’s CEO after nearly decade of leading the IT behemoth.

Mr. Palmisano led the company using a framework based on four questions. According to Palmisiano, these four questions were a way to focus thinking and prod the company beyond its comfort zone and to make I.B.M. pre-eminent again:

1. Why would someone spend their money with you — so what is unique about you?
2. Why would somebody work for you?
3. Why would society allow you to operate in their defined geography — their country?
4. And why would somebody invest their money with you?

Palmisiano used this approach to redefine IBM as a smaller, more profitable company by divesting businesses like PC and disk drives and acquiring PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting among others.

My take: I like Palmisano’s questions; they point to an overarching theme: Value creation. I find that too many executives forget to ask themselves and their people about how they really create value. Even if they had a good idea of the answers to Palmisiano’s questions at one point in time, the world changes and they need to continue to ask — and answer — those four questions.

But there’s another key component to this type of framework: honesty. It’s tempting to view the world through the eyes of optimisim, but this gets in the way of good decision making. That’s why I often refer to a key lesson that I learned from Jack Welch during my days at GE:

“Deal with the world as it is, not how you’d like it to be“

The bottom line: Be honest: how will your company create value in the future?

The report is on sale for $195

We just published a new Temkin Group report, Employee Engagement Benchmark Study. The analysis uncovers a strong connection between employee engagement and customer experience as well as between employee engagement and productivity.

Here’s the executive summary:

Employee engagement is one of the four customer experience core competencies and it’s the one that companies tend to struggle with the most. To examine this critical area, we surveyed more than 2,400 U.S. employees. Here are some highlights of the findings: only 40% of employees are fully committed to helping their companies succeed, 54% will do something good for the company even if it’s not expected, and 26% are likely to look for a new job within six months. We also introduced the Temkin Employee Engagement Index (TEEI) based on how employees feel about three areas: understanding the company mission, feeling that their feedback is valued, and having the required training and tools. Using the TEEI, we found that only 31% of employees are highly engaged. These highly engaged employees are a real asset; they’re 5.8 times more committed to helping their companies succeed and 4.7 times more likely to recommend that someone apply for a job at their company. It turns out that companies with good customer experience have 2.5 times more engaged employees than companies with poor customer experience.

To gauge the level of employee engagement across respondents, we used the Temkin Employee Engagement Index (TEEI), which is based on how much employees agree with three statements:

1. I understand the overall mission of my company
2. My company asks for my feedback and acts upon my input
3. My company provides me with the training and the tools that I need to be successful

Using the TEEI results from the 2,435 respondents, our analysis uncovered a number of interesting items. Here’s a graphic I put together to summarize some of the key data in the report:

The report highlights four recommendations:

The report is on sale for $195

The bottom line: Employee engagement is critical for long-term (and short-term) success