As I mentioned in a previous blog post, Michael Porter, a colleague of mine, was live-blogging at last week’s Forrester CXNYC event, a conference for customer experience leaders, innovators, and practitioners.
During one of the presentations he attended, George F. Colony, the CEO of Forrester, discussed how customer experience has become the most critical barrier to gaining and keeping customers. While he shared a handful of stories from a mix of industries, George mentioned an example from banking that I wanted to pass along.
Nine months ago, George visited the CMO of a very large bank to provide her with her company’s new Forrester CX Index score. Upon review, she remarked that her next biggest competitor, who spent one-fifth the amount as she did on customer experience, had a better score. George explained that it was likely because the way the two companies approached their customers was vastly different. The CMO asked for evidence and George obliged. After reviewing letters from the CEO to shareholders, he found their competitor used the word “customers” much more often. He extrapolated that this was probably indicative of the company culture, and that there was a lesson in it – for all of us.
