We all know that customers are demanding more ways to personalize their experiences with a business. Now that we have entered a new era defined by social Web, customer experience strategies need to focus not only on utilitarian, functional, and operational characteristics, but also emotion, style, design, and person-to-person (social) interactions as dominant factors. Consumers increasingly look to their peers for advice and recommendations about products and services. In recent a Forrester survey, consumers indicated they trusted the following sources of information in the following order: “opinion of friend who has used the product” – 83%; “consumer reviews on a retailer’s site” - 60%; “consumer reviews by users of a content site” – 52%; “an online review by the editors of a content site” – 49%.
What does this mean for CRM professionals? You must make experience-based differentiation a top priority. And, your customer experience strategy must take into account the consumer-to-consumer conversations that rapidly spread stories about poor experiences within a buyer community. User community interactions increasingly define important elements of the perceived customer experience, not the seller. A lack of a coordinated approach for how to participate in the social Web will make it difficult for enterprises to achieve the goal of a “branded customer experience.”
Creating extraordinary customer experiences is at the top of the list of priorities of many senior executives today. In fact, 85% percent of our Customer Experience Peer Research Panelists say that customer experience will play a very important or critical role in their firms' competitiveness over the next three years. Although there's a clear consensus on the importance of customer experience, more than half of our panelists report that their companies have an undisciplined approach to customer experience management. Only 46% of our respondents have enterprisewide customer experience programs, and more than one-third of these have just been started in the past six months.
Given the need to adapt to an empowered social customer, compete in an experience-based economy, what should you about it? My colleague Bruce Temkin tells me he is seeing companies consider establishing the role of “Chief Customer/Experience Officer (CC/CEO).” This approach can be useful for companies who try to differentiate themselves through an explicit set of promises to customers — like Westpac Banking's "Ask Once" commitments or Travelocity.com's "Travelocity Guarantee." A CC/EO can help develop and manage the details of programs like this that typically span existing organizational boundaries.
However, customer experience is not a standalone activity — it's a fundamental piece of how a company operates. So if the CC/EO is told to develop a “social web” strategy for enriching the customer experience, he runs a high risk of defining a direction that is disjointed from the overall business. For a CC/EO to be successful, the customer experience strategy must be a component that fits within a firm's overall strategy. The CC/EO should only be responsible for helping to articulate the customer experience objectives that support the company's overall strategy or for infusing those objectives into corporate strategy.