We are live-blogging from Forrester’s CXNYC this week, the event for customer experience leaders, innovators, and practitioners.
I’m here at the Forrester Customer Experience event in New York City. It’s a surprisingly large event with people from all over the US here to talk about customer experience. Already the focus seems to include data in a big way. George F Colony, CEO of Forrester, kicked it off.
Big ideas: every company worldwide is facing an existential crisis over the next ten years. It’s being driven by power shift from institutions and towards the customer. Customer Experience becomes the most critical asset to gaining and keeping customers.
Walmart recently announced the closing of 500 stores. One factor to this is that Walmart didn’t adapt to what customers expected in this experience. Amazon is the #1 rated company in France and the UK, not just the US.
Positive Story: 6 years ago, it was the most hated airline in the United States. The CEO got the executive team together and said, “We need to do something about this” In the CX index, Delta has moved from the bottom to near the top. Delta passed United to become the #2 airline in the US.
CX is really about software. In the future, every company will be a software company. Doesn’t matter what you do. You will be judged on the quality of your software. Forrester refers to this as Business Technology.
Take Tesla for example. The car updates ever 5-10 days. Contrast that with Audi, the car doesn’t change once you buy it.
Story: Nine months ago, visited the CMO of a very large bank. George handed the new CX Index score to her. She complained that her next biggest competitor who spent 1/5 as much was ranked higher. When asked, George said, it’s probably about the cultures of the two companies. The CMO said, “Prove it!” When reviewing the CEO letters to shareholders they found the other company mentioned customers much more often. Culture change has to happen from the top down.
Quote: You can’t buy culture. You have to work your way to culture
