FOR: Customer Experience Professionals The Unified Customer Experience Imperative by Ron Rogowski, April 30, 2012 KEY TAKEAWAYS Today s Landscape Requires A Unified Approach To CX As organizations deliver experiences across a fractured array of touchpoints, pressure to deliver a cohesive experience across all interactions mounts. Firms need to take a unified approach to digital experience that matches content, functionality, and a coherent brand personality to user tasks, expectations, and context across touchpoints. Unified Experiences Don t Have To Be Uniform Customers need experiences that are right-sized for the touchpoint and their context. Instead of focusing on rote uniformity, firms should strive to deliver the necessary parts of an overall experience that uses design patterns, right-sized content and functionality, and appropriate expressions of brand for the user s context. The Digital CX Organization Must Make Unifying Experiences Paramount The digital customer experience organization must take the lead in working within and across silos to build repeatable design processes and oversight mechanisms that ensure that all touchpoints fit together to deliver a unified overall experience. Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA Tel: +1 617.613.6000 Fax: +1 617.613.5000 www.forrester.com
APRIL 30, 2012 The Unified Customer Experience Imperative Delivering Experience Excellence Across A Fractured Network Of Digital Touchpoints by Ron Rogowski with Vidya Drego L. and Belle Bocal WHY READ THIS REPORT Today s digital landscape is distributed across an array of touchpoints and devices. With customers able to interact through multiple channels at any given moment, firms need to ensure that they present a coherent face across all interactions. This report defines the attributes of, and offers advice for how to build and deliver, a unified customer experience across interaction points. Table Of Contents 2 3 10 12 13 Firms Aren t Equipped To Deliver Cohesive Cross-Channel Experiences Cross-Channel Excellence Requires A Unified Approach To Experience Unified Experiences Deliver Cohesive, But Not Necessarily Uniform, Experiences CX Professionals Must Lead Unified CX Initiatives RECOMMENDATIONS Lay The Groundwork For Unified Experiences Supplemental Material Notes & Resources Forrester interviewed 14 vendor and user companies, including Acquity Group, Blast Radius, Clarity FI Strategic and Financial Consulting, Cynergy Systems, EffectiveUI, Fidelity, Foviance, IBM, Metrica Systems, Rosetta, Roundarch Isobar, SapientNitro, SDL, and Telstra. Related Research Documents Use Visual Design To Help Unify The Digital Customer Experience October 17, 2011 How To Develop Your Digital Customer Experience Strategy July 13, 2011 Why You Need A Digital Customer Experience Strategy May 18, 2011 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester, Technographics, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. To purchase reprints of this document, please email clientsupport@forrester.com. For additional information, go to www.forrester.com.
The Unified Customer Experience Imperative 2 FIRMS AREN T EQUIPPED TO DELIVER COHESIVE CROSS-CHANNEL EXPERIENCES Companies are waking up to the realization that great customer experience (CX) is the biggest driver of competitive advantage today (see Figure 1). 1 As customer interactions span an increasingly complex array of fractured touchpoints many of them digital such as websites, apps, communities, and social networks, companies need to coordinate well-orchestrated experiences across all touchpoints. 2 But this proves problematic because companies: Design their experiences in silos. Whether organized by business group, channel, or both, different parts of a single organization can concern themselves with one small part of what a customer experiences overall. The result can be disjointed experiences for customers who leave the experiences believing often correctly that different parts of the same organization don t have access to the same information. Lack adequate and accessible standards. Companies make painstaking efforts to create standards for their websites but often lack standards for other touchpoints. Making the problem worse is the fact that designers have difficulty using the standards that exist because key details are buried deep within PDF files that can be as long as 300 pages and that s assuming that they can even find the PDFs buried in the recesses of convoluted corporate intranets. What s more, standards typically define basic things like visual styles and layouts. While those things are important, most standards documents lack well-defined interaction specifications and details that describe the experiential qualities of key brand attributes. Don t have cross-division oversight. Even when companies have well-defined standards, they often lack processes that enable designers to follow them and coordinate effectively with other teams. Beyond enforcing existing standards, this lack of governance leaves companies without any mechanism to proactively educate and guide teams on how their pieces of the experience puzzle fit within the overall strategy and larger ecosystem. 3
The Unified Customer Experience Imperative 3 Figure 1 Firms Expect Customer Experience To Be A Differentiator How would you describe your executive team s goal for customer experience? To differentiate ourselves from all firms across any industry 11% To differentiate ourselves from competitors in our industry 64% To maintain parity with other leaders in our industry To keep from falling too far behind leaders in our industry To stay in the mainstream in our industry To stay slightly behind the mainstream in our industry Our executive team doesn t have explicit goals related to customer experience 7% 2% 8% 1% 6% 75% seek to differentiate on customer experience. Base: 84 customer experience professionals (percentages do not total 100 because of rounding) Source: Q4 2011 Global Customer Experience Peer Research Panel Online Survey CROSS-CHANNEL EXCELLENCE REQUIRES A UNIFIED APPROACH TO EXPERIENCE The goal of a company s cross-channel efforts should be to create a seamless network of interaction points that enables customers to choose where they want to interact and provides consistency of information across touchpoints as well as continuity when transitioning across them, all while maintaining a coherent brand personality. 4 To serve the diverse needs of even a single customer across digital touchpoints, CX professionals must focus on building unified CX. Forrester defines unified CX as (see Figure 2): Experiences that match content, functionality, and a coherent brand personality to user expectations, tasks, and context across touchpoints.
The Unified Customer Experience Imperative 4 Figure 2 The Unified Customer Experience Customer context and goal Digital product/ application Website Mobile site Mobile app Tablet app Email IVR Social (e.g., Facebook, communities) Brand personality Content Functionality Information Interaction Visual design architecture design Unified Experiences Deliver Cohesive, But Not Necessarily Uniform, Experiences Unified experiences are not uniform (see Figure 3). Instead, they offer avenues to the right set of content based on user context (see Figure 4). Unified experiences: Use recognizable design patterns. The first thing customers react to when they hit any digital touchpoint is its visual design. 5 While companies needn t strive for a 1:1 use of visual designs from one touchpoint to another, the patterns and styles for imagery, typography, and layouts should be carried over from one touchpoint to another, while matching styles used in offline channels as well. 6 For example, The New York Times stately serif fonts accentuate the firm s heritage across all of its touchpoints traditional and digital. Meanwhile, Toms Shoes incorporates elements of its imagery, typography, and layout on both its website and its Twitter page (see Figure 5). Right-size content and functionality. Content and functionality don t need to be recreated for every touchpoint. Instead, they should be created once and reused/resized to match the appropriate user context. For example, The Boston Globe s desktop site provides a navigation bar across the top of the page, while the mobile site hides the navigation behind a sections menu. Meanwhile, the mobile app uses a different paradigm that provides the same content in
The Unified Customer Experience Imperative 5 a way that leverages specific device capabilities (see Figure 6). 7 In the UK, when Sainsbury s recognized that people were calling to change the time slots they d entered on the website for home delivery, the company began sending automated text reminders that gave users the opportunity to change the delivery time without having to go back to the site, increasing satisfaction and cost savings. Project brand attributes according to user context. Brands need to be more human; like real people, they need to have a personality that can adapt to the context of the people they interact with. Just as a human would, a company needs to speak in different tones, depending on what a customer needs. For example, Southwest Airlines adopts a more formal and distant tone when describing sensitive policies that might require larger passengers to buy more than one seat than it does when describing its bags fly free policy. More subtly, Toms Shoes makes an indirect statement about its brand on its Facebook page where it likes brands and organizations that share a similar mission (see Figure 7). Meanwhile American Express Open network enables user conversations about things like using tablet computers for small businesses on its Facebook site, while providing more expert opinions on its website (see Figure 8). Figure 3 Unified Experiences Are Well Beyond Uniform Use the same visual design and verbatim messaging across channels Make the same depth and breadth of content available across touchpoints Make all features/functionality available in all touchpoints Provide a one-size-fits-all experience that doesn t leverage channel and device capabilities Express brand personality naturally through visuals and tone Size content for context Target features and functionality to meet channel-specific needs Leverage unique channel capabilities to provide a relevant experience
The Unified Customer Experience Imperative 6 Figure 4 Fidelity Matches Visual Styles And Provides Multiple Ways To Access Content Fidelity.com and 401k.com have similar, but not identical, interfaces and link to a subset of content. Source: FMR website
The Unified Customer Experience Imperative 7 Figure 5 Toms Shoes Uses Visual Design To Unify Its Site And Twitter Page Toms Shoes incorporates visual design elements across its website and Twitter page. Source: Toms Shoes website; Twitter website
The Unified Customer Experience Imperative 8 Figure 6 The Boston Globe Unifies Its Experience With Responsive Interfaces The desktop site exposes all sections, while the mobile site hides them under the sections label. The mobile app delivers the same content with a different visual paradigm that mimics the print version. Source: The New York Times Company website; The Boston Globe mobile app
The Unified Customer Experience Imperative 9 Figure 7 Toms Shoes Facebook Page Reinforces The Company s Brand Mission Tom s Shoes Facebook page includes Likes that align with its brand mission Source: Facebook website
The Unified Customer Experience Imperative 10 Figure 8 American Express Open Brand Is Clear In Its Community And Site Source: American Express website; Facebook website American Express Open site includes advice from experts, while the Facebook site includes advice from peers on the same topic. CX PROFESSIONALS MUST LEAD UNIFIED CX INITIATIVES Delivering unified CX is more than an exercise in developing and enforcing a set of standards. Instead, organizations need to develop their CX disciplines into repeatable practices that help tie experiences together (see Figure 9). 8 To advance their practices, CX professionals need to view their roles as educators whose job is to: Promote an easy-to-follow and repeatable design process. When different parts of an organization are designing different interactions, it can be difficult for CX professionals to manage the quality of those interactions. That s why firms need to establish repeatable processes that promote quality without requiring designers to refer to unwieldy documentation. What makes a good process? It s one that enables designers to focus on what they re building without having to pay too much attention to the overall picture. How do you codify this process? One financial institution provides checklists that walk designers through a series of questions about how their proposed designs align with user goals, overall strategy, and brand attributes. Each of the 15 questions links to detailed examples that help designers follow established standards.
The Unified Customer Experience Imperative 11 Establish and track a set of metrics to fit the strategy. When firms only measure outcomes from a specific channel, they may not be viewing the entire picture of what a customer experiences. For example, a website user who buys a product but calls to ask questions about delivery timelines because the site didn t specify when the product would ship might be dissatisfied as a result and, worse, cancel the order. But website metrics alone won t connect those dots. That s why CX professionals need to help establish metrics that track the overall experience. 9 Maintain a library of content and functionality assets. Content and functionality need to differ depending on user tasks. But digital experience building blocks like forms or product descriptions that appear in multiple instances shouldn t be recreated each time designers build something new. Instead, CX professionals should maintain a library of assets that meet internal standards and usability best practices that can be easily repurposed to fit the needs of other groups. This will help them stay on track and focus on building the more unique parts of the interaction rather than reinventing the wheel. Facilitate cross-silo connections. While tearing down the silos is a noble long-term objective, it won t happen without major organizational changes. In the meantime, CX professionals have to work within the structure of the existing organization and serve as guides and educators for siloed teams that typically don t report to them. How? They should oversee the different projects in flight across different business units and touchpoints. This enables the central team to understand the processes and approaches that different teams take and provide guidance when they start to drift away from customer goals and strategy. It also helps broaden a central set of knowledge about skills that can help facilitate cross-silo connections that might otherwise not happen. Figure 9 Mature CX Organizations Deliver Unified Experiences Discipline Strategy Customer understanding Design Culture Measurement Governance Description You define the intended experience based on company strategy, brand, and customer needs. Everyone knows who your customers are, what they do now, and what they want going forward. You consciously design experiences using known design best practices. You create and maintain a customer-centric culture. You track customer experience quality on an ongoing basis. Specific people monitor and proactively manage customer experience quality. Role in unifying experiences Strategy determines which experiences get prioritized and guides the personality of those interactions. Knowledge of how customers behave over time reveals how cohesive the experience is. Design standards and frameworks help focus on the project at hand while helping it tie in to the overall intended experience across touchpoints. It encourages cross-group collaboration that facilitates cohesive experiences. Consistent KPIs show overall experience quality and touchpoint quality. It directs funding, helps facilitate communication, and aggregates and disseminates best practices across teams.
The Unified Customer Experience Imperative 12 RECOMMENDATIONS LAY THE GROUNDWORK FOR UNIFIED EXPERIENCES Before they can focus on managing experiences across touchpoints, CX professionals need to lay a foundation that provides context for how each business unit and/or touchpoint contribute to the overall experience. To do this, CX professionals need to define and disseminate: A clear CX strategy. Firms need a plan to guide the activities and resources required to meet or exceed customers expectations. 10 A clear digital CX strategy reflects a company strategy, propagates a coherent brand personality, paints a vivid picture of how the company will meet user needs, and should serve as the rallying point for all CX efforts. 11 CX professionals need to spell out and socialize the principles that guide employee behavior. For example, John Deere Financial took its brand promises and translated them into Key Decision Factors that direct staff on the kinds of activities that matter most to its customers. Furthermore, CX professionals need to use the strategy as a filter for funding and staffing projects. A single view of the customer. If they want to facilitate smooth transitions across multiple touchpoints, CX professionals need to understand, document, and disseminate information about who customers are and how they go about accomplishing their goals as they cross touchpoints. 12 Tools like cross-channel personas and customer journey maps can help. Good journey maps show an understanding of customer needs, likely touchpoints, and emotional states that give a complete picture of not only what customers need to see and do but also what they need to feel. 13 A brand personality that will permeate all interactions. Brand guidelines need to be about much more than visual design. Every piece of content, every interactive element, and every word become a representation of the brand. CX professionals need to work with brand organizations particularly ones that are schooled in traditional channels to go beyond a list of generic attributes and to define the interactive qualities of the brand that will manifest themselves across touchpoints. Leaders at MailChimp did just that, creating a brand persona that specifies how the brand will behave in digital interfaces. 14
The Unified Customer Experience Imperative 13 SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL Companies Interviewed For This Report Acquity Group Blast Radius Clarity FI Strategic and Financial Consulting Cynergy Systems EffectiveUI Fidelity Foviance IBM Metrica Systems Rosetta Roundarch Isobar SapientNitro SDL Telstra ENDNOTES 1 We ve entered the age of the customer an era where a focus on customers matters more than any other strategic imperative. Companies are waking up to the fact that customers perceptions have a profound impact on business metrics ranging from brand equity and customer loyalty to increased revenue and cost savings. See the October 4, 2011, Why Customer Experience? Why Now? report. 2 The Internet is splintering across proprietary platforms like the Apple iphone and Google Android. Connected televisions will have their own interactive formats. Even on PCs, social sites like Facebook shatter the unity of the Web with content behind a password, invisible to search engines. Familiar online marketing tools like links, search engine optimization (SEO), and analytics are different or missing in these new environments. See the January 26, 2010, The Splinternet report. 3 Even companies that make customer experience a strategic priority struggle to implement major longlasting improvements. That s because they fail to connect behind-the-scenes activities to customer interactions. These firms need a new approach to customer experience management: one that considers the influence of every single employee and external partner on every single customer interaction. Forrester calls this complex set of relationships the customer experience ecosystem. To fully understand how they deliver customer experiences today and make meaningful improvements going forward, customer experience professionals must map their company s ecosystem and adopt best practices from the emerging field of service design. See the June 22, 2011, The Customer Experience Ecosystem report. 4 Today s cookie-cutter digital experiences fail to leave lasting impressions on customers, in part because they lack a coherent personality. Companies hoping to engage their customers in digital channels should adopt what Forrester calls emotional experience design (EED). A key principle of the framework asserts that firms need to develop a coherent brand personality by matching visual design styles across channels, building digital interactions that sync with brand attributes, and adopting a human tone. Firms should focus on establishing the right brand personality for their digital channels by looking within for guidance, obsessing
The Unified Customer Experience Imperative 14 about how interactions take place, and co-opting frameworks for building brand DNA instead of blindly copying competitors and market leaders. See the March 9, 2011, Mastering Emotional Experience Design: Develop A Coherent Personality report. 5 When people first encounter a person or an object, they have an immediate visceral, subconscious reaction that predisposes them to approach or turn away. This fight or flight mechanism also applies to interfaces. If users are turned off by the color palette, layout, or other display characteristics, that negative disposition will skew their overall experience. See the April 13, 2011, Mastering Emotional Experience Design: Engage A Mix Of Senses report. 6 Customers expect the companies they do business with to coordinate services and designs across channels. The first and most elemental way to demonstrate and deliver on this expectation is to use image styles, typography, and layout techniques that are easily recognizable across multiple touchpoints. See the October 17, 2011, Use Visual Design To Help Unify The Digital Customer Experience report. 7 Companies looking to harness the power of touchscreen devices must design experiences that match appropriate device capabilities with user goals. See the January 23, 2009, Match iphone Capabilities To Customer Goals report. 8 To excel at customer experience, organizations must routinely perform the practices required to design, implement, and manage customer experience in a disciplined way. Forrester scanned its 13 years of customer experience research and created a framework that outlines 40 essential practices across six disciplines: customer understanding, measurement, governance, strategy, design, and culture. Organizations looking to move up the maturity curve should take stock of how they perform these practices today if at all and build a plan to turn an ad hoc set of activities into a self-improving customer experience management machine. See the September 12, 2011, Customer Experience Maturity Defined report. 9 When measuring customer experience, companies need to focus on customers perceptions of their interaction with the firm. That s because experiences are subjective customers perception is their reality. Just knowing how customers feel about an interaction isn t enough, though. Tracking the who, what, when, and where of an experience helps uncover the underlying cause of what customers felt. Firms also need to track what customers do after an experience in order to show the business value of better experiences. Companies looking to measure customer experience should organize the data they have today into three buckets: what happened, customers perception of what happened, and what customers did based on their perception. Grouping metrics this way will make the data easier to understand and highlight gaps in the data that need to be filled. See the January 24, 2011, Perception Is Reality When Measuring Customer Experience report. 10 Companies say that digital touchpoints are critical to their customer experience efforts but don t have an approach for multitouchpoint experience, don t know customers expectations, and don t know how to represent their brands. The problem is only getting more challenging as users demands widen across an expanding array of digital touchpoints. Customer experience professionals at firms where customer experience is a stated strategic priority need a plan that guides activities and investment in digital customer experience. See the May 18, 2011, Why You Need A Digital Customer Experience Strategy report.
The Unified Customer Experience Imperative 15 11 To deeply engage their users, firms must transition from designing for functional needs in a single channel to addressing customers real goals across all interaction points. See the January 18, 2011, Mastering Emotional Experience Design: Address Customers Real Goals report. 12 We recommend that organizations use customer journey maps to examine interactions from their customers points of view. Mapping the customer journey requires five steps: 1) Collect internal insights; 2) develop initial hypotheses; 3) research customer processes, needs, and perceptions; 4) analyze customer research; and 5) map the customer journey. To get the most value from these journey maps, companies need to widely share findings, take action on insights, and sustain the learnings over time. See the February 5, 2010, Mapping The Customer Journey report. 13 Based on Forrester s published research and our analysis of firms existing journey maps, we created a simple methodology to assess the effectiveness of customer journey map deliverables. See the October 15, 2010, Assess The Effectiveness Of Your Customer Journey Map report. 14 Source: Aarron Walter, Personality in Design, A List Apart Magazine, October 18, 2011 (http://www. alistapart.com/articles/personality-in-design/).
About Forrester Global marketing and strategy leaders turn to Forrester to help them make the tough decisions necessary to capitalize on shifts in marketing, technology, and consumer behavior. We ensure your success by providing: Data-driven insight to understand the impact of changing consumer behavior. Forward-looking research and analysis to guide your decisions. Objective advice on tools and technologies to connect you with customers. Best practices for marketing and cross-channel strategy. FOR MORE INFORMATION To find out how Forrester Research can help you be successful every day, please contact the office nearest you, or visit us at www.forrester.com, For a complete list of worldwide locations, visit www.forrester.com/about. CLIENT SUPPORT For information on hard-copy or electronic reprints, please contact Client Support at +1 866.367.7378, +1 617.613.5730, or clientsupport@forrester.com. We offer quantity discounts and special pricing for academic and nonprofit institutions. Forrester Focuses On Customer Experience Professionals To improve the perceived quality of customer interactions with your company, you must leverage emerging digital technologies and lead enterprise-wide customer experience transformations. Forrester helps you create forward-thinking strategies to justify decisions and optimize your individual, team, and corporate performance. «CARL ERICKSON, client persona representing Customer Experience Professionals Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology. Forrester works with professionals in 19 key roles at major companies providing proprietary research, customer insight, consulting, events, and peer-to-peer executive programs. For more than 28 years, Forrester has been making IT, marketing, and technology industry leaders successful every day. For more information, visit www.forrester.com.