This morning we released the latest version of an annual client favorite: “How Companies Improved Their CXi Scores, 2013.”
As we do each year, we compiled a list of brands whose scores went up five or more points in our Customer Experience Index over the past year (in this case, between 2012 and 2013). We asked CX leaders from those brands if they’d be willing to tell us what they did to drive those improvements. Finally, we synthesized their answers into a list of best practices that others can learn from.
As …

I am huge fan of Nordstrom. They have famed customer service and that is one of the reasons why I shop there. But even I was surprised by this.
Last week I was shopping at Nordstrom and bought merchadise at a few departments. The strip on my Nordstrom VISA card had apparently stopped working because each cashier had trouble swiping the card and had to resort to typing in the numbers into the register. I made an offhand comment to one of the cashieres that I would have to call in …

There is a staggering amount of customer experience work going on in the healthcare industry these days. From providers (the docs), to pharma companies and payers (health insurers), everyone is trying to figure out what to do and how to do it.
One guy who’s figured out a lot is David Shapiro, who wowed members of Forrester’s Customer Experience Council last year with a presentation of how UnitedHealth Group uses journey maps to transform experiences. David is the vice president of member experience for Medicare and retirement at UnitedHealth, and he's …

At Forrester, we define customer experience as how customers perceive their interactions with your company.
Over the past few years, my colleagues and I have written a lot about the perceptions piece of that definition. Here’s a quick overview: Customers’ perceptions occur on three different levels, which we collectively refer to as the customer experience pyramid. At the base of the pyramid is “meets needs.” Do customers perceive that you’ve met their basic needs and provided value through the interaction? Then we layer on “easy.” Do customers perceive that you’re …

Each April or May for the past 12 years we have published the Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Centers,” but this year we’ve dared to disturb the universe by replacing it with The Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center. (If you are a Gartner client you can find it at http://www.gartner.com/document/2482521.  The question my colleagues are asking is: in a world where you are rated, in part, by how many people click on your research, WHY abandon a very highly read document for one that no one has ever …