When we presented two of Forrester’s five 2023 predictions for customer experience (CX), we were thrilled to see the volume of questions that rolled in through the chat and the Q&A feature. In fact, several webinar attendees asked if they could get a copy of the responses to every question, so we figured that consolidating them into a blog post would make this information even more accessible. This is the second of two blog posts on this topic; the first blog post covered the content we shared at the webinar.
The questions primarily fell into four areas:
- Differentiation. Many attendees wanted to know why CX differentiation is eroding in three-fourths of industries. There are two major reasons. First, CX gets harder as organizations mature. Once obvious problems are fixed, what’s left is larger transformative work that requires more time, effort, and skill to undertake. Second, many CX teams don’t have a complete understanding of what drives effective experiences. A common situation: A company redesigns a journey to be digital-only, without fully understanding customer reactions to these changes and without effectively communicating and teaching customers about the new journey.
- CX measurement. Webinar attendees wanted to know how best to measure CX performance. Two big challenges we see companies struggle with are:
- Measuring at the right altitude: CX teams often want to jump right into the details by measuring at the touchpoint level. Others overly rely on high-level beacon metrics. That leaves the middle level — journey-level measurement — out in the cold. This is a big miss as customers typically perceive their experiences at the journey level.
- Selecting the right metrics: Attendees wanted to know what metrics are best for measuring CX. However, the answer depends on your organization’s situation. For example, a company looking to grow market share would be well-served by using NPS as its beacon metric. Companies looking to up retention might want to choose wallet share as their CX north star.
- CX team responsibilities and skills. Some attendees asked how they can address skill gaps and what responsibilities CX teams should take on. A CX team should have “accelerant” skills that elevate the team’s impact beyond find-and-fix work — design thinking, survey design, journey mapping, and data literacy and storytelling, to name a few. CX teams can “borrow” these skills by building relationships with departments and can upskill themselves with courses like Forrester’s CX certification or MIT’s OpenCourseWare.
- B2B CX. We got several questions about whether CX applies to B2B firms. Some of these questions were about Forrester’s CX Index, but others were more vague in their intent, so we’ll tackle both here. Forrester’s CX Index measures consumers’ experiences with B2C brands, but a B2B study customized for software as a service (SaaS) firms was launched in 2023 to gather data about business clients’ experiences with CRM and human capital management SaaS firms. As far as whether CX applies to B2B, the answer is an enthusiastic YES! B2B CX is more complicated to measure than B2C CX, because the relationship is often one-to-several versus the one-to-one relationship when it’s just a brand serving an individual consumer. Forrester has a wealth of B2B CX research, including case studies of CX-fueled financial success, to show that B2B CX is absolutely a thing.
Want to learn more about Forrester’s predictions for 2023? Catch up on the recording to get the full scoop and listen to the live Q&A. You can also go to Forrester’s Predictions Hub to learn about all of our predictions for 2023. Forrester clients can also request an inquiry or guidance session on the prediction of their choice at any time. Not a Forrester client? Contact your Forrester account team and tell them, “I want Forrester Decisions!”
