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May 18, 2011

Why You Need A Digital Customer Experience Strategy

by Ron Rogowski for Customer Experience Professionals

Making Leaders Successful Every Day

For Customer Experience Professionals

May 18, 2011

Why You Need A Digital Customer Experience Strategy

It’s Time To Back Up The Claim That Digital Customer Experience Is Important

by Ron Rogowski with Moira Dorsey, Paul Hagen, Vidya L. Drego, and Allison Stone

Exec ut i v e S u mmary Companies say that digital touchpoints are critical to their customer experience efforts but don’t have an approach for multi-touchpoint 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. This report outlines the key elements of a digital customer experience strategy, where it derives from, and how firms can get started building a strategy that’s right for their brands.

tabl e o f Co n tents 2 Firms Say That Digital Customer Experience Is Important But Fail To Execute Proliferating Digital Touchpoints Exacerbate The Customer Experience Challenge 6 If Digital Customer Experience Is A Top Priority, Then You Need A Strategy For It Digital Customer Experience Strategy Is Founded On Business Needs, Customers, And Brand 9 Build The Right Digital Customer Experience Strategy For Your Brand recommendations

11 Craft Your Digital Customer Experience Now 12 Supplemental Material

N OT E S & RE S OU RCE S Forrester interviewed 12 vendor and user companies: Acquity Group; Cynergy Systems; EffectiveUI; Experience Engineering; Level, a Rosetta Company; MCorp Consulting; Philips Consumer Lifestyle; Roundarch; SapientNitro; Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide; Universal Mind; and Verizon.

Related Research Documents “The State Of Customer Experience, 2011” February 17, 2011 “What Is The Right Customer Experience Strategy?”

September 28, 2010 “The Future Of Online Customer Experience” January 28, 2010

© 2011 Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Forrester, Forrester Wave, RoleView, Technographics, TechRankings, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Reproduction or sharing of this content in any form without prior written permission is strictly prohibited. To purchase reprints of this document, please email clientsupport@ forrester.com. For additional reproduction and usage information, see Forrester’s Citation Policy located at www.forrester.com. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change.

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Why You Need A Digital Customer Experience Strategy For Customer Experience Professionals

Firms say That Digital Customer Experience is important but fail to execute Firms claim that customer experience is important (see Figure 1). Why? They see it as a way to differentiate themselves from both direct and indirect competition (see Figure 2). To make customer experience improvements, many organizations are focusing on digital channels ahead of more traditional ones like call centers and stores (see Figure 3).1 Despite the amount of attention and effort firms pay to digital customer experiences, they struggle to make improvements because they:

· Don’t have a defined approach for multi-touchpoint customer experience. Customer

experience professionals cite the lack of a clear customer experience strategy as the top barrier to improving customer experience (see Figure 4). Moreover, firms lack discipline in tying their digital strategies to broader strategies for customer experience (see Figure 5).

· Don’t understand customers’ expectations. Firms want to meet their customers’ needs

but don’t have the most basic information to do it. Few fully understand what an experience must deliver to be perceived as matching or beating customers’ expectations, and even fewer consistently incorporate customers’ needs into decisions (see Figure 6).

· Don’t know how to represent their brands. To make matters worse, the majority of employees don’t fully understand brand attributes. And firms don’t translate brand attributes into specific customer promises, even though a company’s brand plays a huge role in setting customers’ expectations for their interactions with a firm (see Figure 7).

Figure 1 Customer Experience Is A Top Priority “Is customer experience one of your company’s top strategic priorities for 2011?”

No 12%

Don’t know 3%

Yes 86% Base: 118 customer experience professionals (percentages do not total 100 because of rounding) Source: Q4 2010 Global Customer Experience Peer Research Panel Survey 58252

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Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

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Why You Need A Digital Customer Experience Strategy For Customer Experience Professionals

Figure 2 Firms Want To Differentiate Based On Experience “How would you describe your executive team’s goal for customer experience?”

To differentiate ourselves from all firms across any industry

76% want to differentiate with customer experience.

13%

To differentiate ourselves from competitors in our industry

63%

To maintain parity with leaders in our industry

11%

To stay in the mainstream in our industry

12%

To keep from falling too far behind leaders in our industry 1% To stay slightly behind the mainstream in our industry 1% Base: 103 customer experience professionals at firms whose executives have customer experience goals (percentages do not total 100 because of rounding) Source: Q4 2010 Global Customer Experience Peer Research Panel Survey Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

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Figure 3 Online Channels Get Top Priority For Customer Experience Improvement “Which of the following are major objectives of your customer experience program in 2011?”

Improving the online customer experience

76%

Improving cross-channel customer experiences

59%

Using communities and other types of Social Computing

46%

Adding or improving mobile customer experiences Improving the experience of interacting with a call center agent Improving the store/branch customer experience Improving the phone self-service customer experience (IVR/speech) Other

46%

None of the above

32% 26% 22% 9% 3%

Base: 118 customer experience professionals (multiple responses accepted) Source: Q4 2010 Global Customer Experience Peer Research Panel Survey 58252

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Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

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Figure 4 Firms Don’t Have A Clear Customer Experience Strategy “Which of the following are significant obstacles to improving the customer experience that your company delivers?”

Lack of a clear customer experience strategy

51%

Lack of budget

48%

Lack of a customer experience management process

45%

Lack of cooperation across organizations

36%

Lack of customer-centric culture

34%

Lack of understanding about customers

27%

Lack of executive involvement

25%

Lack of urgency

18%

Other

8%

None of the above

7%

Base: 118 customer experience professionals (multiple responses accepted) Source: Q4 2010 Global Customer Experience Peer Research Panel Survey Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

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Figure 5 Digital Strategy Is Only Loosely Tied To A Holistic Strategy For Customer Experience “To what extent is your company’s digital strategy derived from a holistic company strategy for customer experience?”

Extremely

10%

Very much

32%

Somewhat

42%

Very little Not at all

13% 4%

Base: 108 customer experience professionals (percentages do not total 100 because of rounding) Source: Q1 2011 Global Customer Experience Peer Research Panel Survey 58252

May 18, 2011

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

© 2011, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Why You Need A Digital Customer Experience Strategy For Customer Experience Professionals

Figure 6 Customers Aren’t At The Core Of Decision-Making Percentage of respondents who agree with the following statements about their company Our company has a clearly defined set of target customer segments

64%

Primary research is used to fully understand the needs and behaviors of target customers

48%

Decision-making processes systematically incorporate the needs of target customers

35%

The quality of interactions with target customers is closely monitored Employees across the company share a consistent and vivid image of target customers

31% 25%

Base: 118 customer experience professionals (multiple responses accepted) Source: Q4 2010 Global Customer Experience Peer Research Panel Survey Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

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Figure 7 Brand Isn’t A Prominent Customer Experience Driver Percentage of respondents who agree with the following statements about their company The attributes of our company’s brand are well defined

62%

Employees fully understand the key attributes of our brand

42%

We translate brand attributes into specific promises we make to customers

42%

Our company’s brand drives how we design customer experiences

32%

Base: 118 customer experience professionals (multiple responses accepted) Source: Q4 2010 Global Customer Experience Peer Research Panel Survey 58252

© 2011, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

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Proliferating Digital Touchpoints Exacerbate The Customer Experience Challenge Delivering a good customer experience was hard enough when digital was limited to websites, email, and interactive voice response (IVR) systems. But an explosion of connected devices and emerging interaction points like social networks, mobile websites, and tablet applications have turned the Internet into the Splinternet. Now, a fractured array of platforms and content enables consumer behaviors that are increasingly complex to design for.2 This new fragmented reality results in:

· Disjointed experiences. Customers see companies and the experiences they provide as holistic entities, not as a collection of channels.3 Yet many firms aren’t prepared to deliver a consistent experience because they work in channel silos that only look at a cross-section of customer interactions, not at the wider reality of how customers interact with their brand as a whole.4

· Unclear priorities. Customer experience spending is increasing.

But an expanding array of channels means that there are more places to consider investing in and more parts of the organization competing for resources. Faced with this dilemma, customer experience professionals are often torn between investing in underperforming established channels and emerging, but unproven, ones.

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· Diluted brands. Maintaining a brand’s consistent visual design is difficult when teams work in silos and have to support both legacy and emerging touchpoints. Beyond visual design, firms struggle to maintain a consistent brand personality in the content, functionality, and language they provide across all of their channels.6

if Digital Customer Experience is A top Priority, Then you need a strategy for it If customer experience is so important, customer experience professionals need to stop merely paying lip service to any aspect of it — including the experiences that take place in rapidly proliferating digital touchpoints. Addressing today’s reality of empowered, ever-connected consumers who demand consistent, seamless experiences across channels requires a formalized approach that starts with defining a digital customer experience strategy. Forrester defines digital customer experience strategy as: A plan that guides the activities and resource allocation needed to deliver experiences that meet or exceed customers’ expectations within and across digital interaction points.

A digital customer experience strategy provides a cohesive view of digital that addresses: the identity and behaviors of the target customers, what they need to accomplish their goals, where experiences will take place, and how the brand will be expressed in interactions (see Figure 8). A digital customer experience strategy should:

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· Reflect a company and brand strategy. Firms need to ground their digital efforts firmly in

the mission and value proposition of the brand. A digital customer experience strategy should translate top-level business objectives into a plan for how digital channels will serve the wider mission by providing interactions that meet the relevant needs of customers. It should also specify how the brand personality should be expressed in digital touchpoints.

· Describe the intended digital experience. A digital customer experience strategy paints a vivid

picture of how the company’s digital interaction points meet customers’ needs, make the company easy to work with, and provide an enjoyable experience.7 It should call out the aspects of customer experience that are most critical to a company’s aspirations for differentiating itself — those facets of the experience that are most important to meeting target customers’ expectations.

· Direct activities and processes. Companies differentiate themselves by performing a different

set of activities than their competitors or by performing the same activities differently.8 An effective digital customer experience strategy informs decisions about how to differentiate digital interactions with customers. When customer experience professionals have a clear vision of what they need to do and how, they’re better equipped to make decisions about which projects to pursue.

· Guide digital channel investments. Firms with a clear strategy prioritize investments in

interactions that fulfill the brand promise and avoid wasting money on chasing new shiny digital capabilities if they don’t. With a clear strategy in place, firms can make informed decisions about the projects that have the most impact on their businesses instead of chasing features that might work for another company with a different strategy.

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Figure 8 A Digital Customer Experience Strategy Addresses Who, What, Where, And How

How?

What?

Personality How should the brand be expressed throughout all interactions?

Content What do customers need to accomplish their goals?

Digital customer experience strategy Customers’ goals Who are they?

What are their goals?

How do they behave?

Who?

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Touchpoints Where do customers consume content?

Where?

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

Digital Customer Experience Strategy Is Founded On Business Needs, Customers, And Brand Firms like Costco, Apple, and USAA, which can be identified as a cost leader, a differentiator, and a segmentor, respectively, have customer experience strategies that are part of the very fabric of those strong brands.9 Implicit or explicit, the company customer experience strategy should be the guidepost for defining how digital interaction points should behave (see Figure 9). But what about firms that don’t have a top-down customer experience strategy? Digital customer experience professionals must lead key stakeholders in a coordinated effort to create one based on:

· Business objectives. Digital touchpoints exist to support delivery of a firm’s value proposition

as directed by C-level executives and channel managers. That’s why business objectives set the context for digital customer experience strategy. For example, Edward Jones’ business strategy is based on developing interpersonal relationships between customers and advisors. That’s why the firm eschews online trading capabilities in favor of content that showcases the benefits of a client-advisor relationship and functionality to connect prospects with local offices.

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Why You Need A Digital Customer Experience Strategy For Customer Experience Professionals

· Customers’ expectations and behaviors. A good customer experience meets the expectations

of the target customers in ways that satisfy business objectives. That’s why incorporating a clear understanding of target customers, their goals, and how they accomplish their goals is essential to creating a definition of success for an organization’s digital interactions. For example, based on a detailed understanding of how customers use different digital touchpoints on a daily basis to achieve their goals, Aetna prioritized upgrades of several websites and expanded its digital footprint to include a mobile website, an iPhone app, and a BlackBerry app. The result was a sixpoint increase in its Customer Experience Index score.10

· Brand strategy. The experiences customers have in digital touchpoints forge their impressions of

a brand. That’s why a digital customer experience strategy must answer a key and often neglected question: How should digital channels behave? Because an experience is subjective, it’s not just what the firm provides but how it provides it and how customers perceive it that matters. That’s why customer experience professionals need to work closely with the brand team to understand and map the brand’s benefits, personality, and behaviors as they relate to target audiences.11

Figure 9 Digital Customer Experience Strategy Should Flow From Enterprise Experience Strategy Company strategy

Customer expectation of the brand

Customer experience strategy

Cost leadership

Lowest prices

Self-service optimization

Differentiation

Innovation

Proactive guidance

Segmentation

Fit

Tailored intimacy

58252

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

Build THE RIGHT Digital CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE STRATEGY FOR YOUR Brand Today’s digital interactions leave an emotional void because they fail to deliver on customers’ needs in a way that differentiates the brand. But customer experience professionals must resist the urge to blindly copy the competition and strive to build digital interactions that reflect their brand, not someone else’s. To do this, they should:

· Align business objectives and user goals. Firms need to make a clear link between what the business needs are and what customers want. Once they’ve made those connections, they should plot the customer journey and use that insight to determine which digital channels

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can provide the biggest benefits to customers and the business. But firms shouldn’t just lock themselves into tactical goals. They should address customers’ underlying goals that drive them to interact with a company.12 For example, nikerunning.com’s Nike+ section isn’t designed to push shoe sales. Instead, it enables users to track and analyze their performance to do what they really want to do — become better athletes. This in turn leads to greater engagement with — and sales for — the Nike brand.13

· Envision the digital customer experience they want to deliver. Customer experience

professionals need to be explicit about the personality they want the brand to convey through every interaction. As a first step, ensure that visual design attributes are consistent across channels. Next, ensure that content, functionality, and language all fit with the brand’s purpose and reflect its key attributes. Finally, adopt a human tone by approaching design from an interpersonal perspective that reflects the intended perceptions of interactions and by matching an appropriate tone and manner to those interactions.14 For example, Virgin Atlantic Airways maintains a consistent visual design and natural, cheeky linguistic tone across its site and apps that make customers feel like they’re dealing with a single, unified entity.

· Determine delivery channels. Once firms have established what goals they need to support and

how they want to conduct themselves, they need to map touchpoint capabilities to those goals.15 For example, iPad apps offer more interactivity, richer output, and more proactive guidance than websites but don’t offer the same amount of practical mobility as smartphone apps that tend to offer more specialized functionality.16 But firms shouldn’t merely think about single-channel solutions. For example, reviews on Sephora’s mobile site helps customers make in-situ decisions about purchases they make while in physical stores.17 USAA’s Auto Circle car buying service offers a glimpse into the future of digital experience with a customized, aggregated, relevant, and social experience.18 Users can customize a vehicle search, get reviews from multiple sources, solicit opinions from friends, and get approval for financing via a website or a smartphone app if they’re on a dealer lot.19

· Uncover gaps in what they deliver today. Experiences that match customers’ expectations

meet business objectives and demonstrate brand attributes. A digital customer experience strategy provides the definition of successful customer experiences that is specific to an organization. Data from a portfolio of evaluation tools, from user surveys to analytics and heuristic evaluations, will help assess the current state of a firm’s customer experiences, compared with the spec described by the strategy.20 With a performance baseline established, customer experience professionals can then set realistic goals for improvement and measure the effectiveness of improvements over time.

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Why You Need A Digital Customer Experience Strategy For Customer Experience Professionals

R ec o mmenda t i o ns

Craft your digital customer experience now If customer experience is a strategic priority at your firm, you need to start developing a digital customer experience strategy. It’s easy to let the urgent (e.g., answering questions like, “When are we building a mobile app?”) be the enemy of the important (e.g., creating a digital customer experience strategy). The problem is that questions like, “When are we building a mobile app?” are much better answered when your perspective comes from using a strategy that poses more important questions like: “Are our customers’ goals better supported with a mobile site or a mobile app?” If the answer is an app, then the questions become, “What features do we need to include, what business objectives will the app serve, what will the business value be, and where should a mobile app be on our priority list?” Customer experience professionals should put the creation of a digital customer experience strategy at the top of their to-do lists. Doing so will better position you to make smart investment and design decisions that delight customers and serve the business.

Supplemental MATERIAL Methodology Forrester fielded its Q4 2010 Global Customer Experience Peer Research Panel Survey to 118 customer experience professionals from our ongoing Marketing & Strategy Research Panel. A portion of the survey results are illustrated in this document — those based on companies with enterprisewide customer experience foci. The panel consists of volunteers who join on the basis of interest and familiarity with specific marketing and strategy topics. For quality assurance, panelists are required to provide contact information and answer basic questions about their firms’ revenue and budgets.

Forrester fielded the survey from December 2010 to January 2011. Respondent incentives included a summary of the survey results.

Forrester fielded its Q1 2011 Global Customer Experience Peer Research Panel Survey to 108 customer experience professionals from our ongoing Marketing & Strategy Research Panel. A portion of the survey results are illustrated in this document — those that pertain to companies’ digital customer experience initiatives. The panel consists of volunteers who join on the basis of interest and familiarity with specific marketing and strategy topics. For quality assurance, panelists are required to provide contact information and answer basic questions about their firms’ revenue and budgets.

Forrester fielded the survey from February to March 2011. Respondent incentives included a summary of the survey results.

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Exact sample sizes are provided in this report on a question-by-question basis. Panels are not guaranteed to be representative of the population. Unless otherwise noted, statistical data is intended to be used for descriptive and not inferential purposes.

If you’re interested in joining one of Forrester’s research panels, you may visit us at http://Forrester. com/Panel.

Companies Interviewed For This Document Acquity Group

Philips Consumer Lifestyle

Cynergy Systems

Roundarch

EffectiveUI

SapientNitro

Experience Engineering

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide

Level, a Rosetta Company

Universal Mind

MCorp Consulting

Verizon

Endnotes 1

To assess the state of customer experience in 2011, Forrester surveyed 118 customer experience professionals around the globe. More than two-thirds said that their firms aim to differentiate based on customer experience. But most companies are ill-prepared to compete on that basis. Not even half have a companywide program to improve customer experience across channels, and only 30% have a dedicated budget to fund those efforts. However, there is hope. We found that having a centralized customer experience team and appointing a single executive to be in charge of customer experience helps knock down barriers to success. See the February 17, 2011, “The State Of Customer Experience, 2011” report.

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In the golden age of the Web, people accessed websites using standard, similarly formatted PCs and browsers. No more. 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. See the January 26, 2010, “The Splinternet” report.

3

Traditional ways of describing multichannel commerce no longer work because customers don’t interact with companies from a “channel” perspective. Customers now use a rapidly evolving set of devices as a means of engaging across touchpoints, which they don’t distinguish from the brand or business. Customers are empowered with more information than ever before. As businesses still struggle to deliver crosschannel experiences, the stream of innovation and market transformation continues to flow unchecked. In response, firms must transform how they market, transact, serve, and organize around changing customer experiences. See the March 11, 2011, “Welcome To The Era Of Agile Commerce” report.

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Customers’ goals can’t always be completely achieved online or in a single channel. Yet moving from one channel to another — a requirement for success — frequently results in frustration. That’s why firms need to make a smooth transition from one channel to another. See the October 26, 2009, “Emotional Experience Design” report.

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A recent survey of Forrester’s Customer Experience Peer Research Panel revealed that the vast majority of firms are planning large-scale digital experience redesign or creation projects in 2011. With these projects come increased spending on internal design staff and design agency services, user research and testing methodologies, as well as technologies for measurement and evaluation. See the February 9, 2011, “Major Digital Design Projects Set The Stage For More Spending In 2011” report.

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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 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.

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The classic customer experience pyramid defines a hierarchy of useful, usable, and desirable. Forrester’s Customer Experience Index attempts to quantify this model by asking customers of various companies three questions: 1) How effective were they at meeting your needs; 2) how easy were they to work with; and 3) how enjoyable were the interactions?

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“Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value.” Source: Michael E. Porter, On Competition, Updated and Expanded Edition, Harvard Business School Press, 2008.

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Most companies lack a customer experience strategy. As a result, their leaders struggle with decisions about funding and prioritizing projects meant to improve customer experience at the enterprise level. To craft their strategies, customer experience leaders should start with their firms’ overall strategies, which define competitive positions and set customer expectations of the brand. To illustrate this approach, we describe three customer experience strategies that align with Michael Porter’s generic company strategies: 1) selfservice optimization for cost leaders; 2) proactive guidance for product or service differentiators; and 3) tailored intimacy for segmentors. See the September 28, 2010, “What Is The Right Customer Experience Strategy?” report.

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To understand how companies drive customer experience improvement, Forrester spoke to leaders at brands having Customer Experience Index (CxPi) scores that went up appreciably in 2011. We uncovered a variety of best practices that range from centralizing coordination of customer experience efforts to measuring and rewarding customer-centric behavior in employees. In addition to operational changes, we heard about a range of specific changes companies made to the Web, mobile, phone, and physical channels to align them with customer needs. Practitioners looking to improve customer experience inside of their

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own firms should use these examples to build a 2011 road map that combines both tactical changes to the current experience and the type of business process transformation that makes a company more customercentric in the long term. See the April 18, 2011, “How Companies Raised Their Customer Experience Index Scores, 2011” report.

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Customer experience professionals struggle to create websites that support key brand attributes because their organizations often lack a shared definition of the brand. To fill the brand experience void, interactive agency Molecular has developed brand personas that help designers refer to key elements of brand style, map key attributes to relevant personas, and organize information in a way that resonates with client stakeholders. To get the most from these valuable design tools, customer experience professionals should make sure that their brand personas are accessible and that they serve as a nexus for user and brand research. Forrester expects this practice to proliferate as firms strive to create more immersive, engaging brand experiences on their customer-facing websites. See the September 8, 2008, “Molecular Brings Brand Personas To Life” report.

Companies hoping to engage their customers in digital channels should adopt what Forrester calls EED. The first principle of the framework asserts that firms need to address their customers’ real goals by continually uncovering latent needs, helping people make good decisions, answering questions before users ask them, and blending experiences across relevant channels. Successful firms build disruptive experiences, provide complementary tools, and completely reframe existing interaction models based on insights gained through exploratory testing techniques. To lay a strong foundation for emotional engagement, customer experience professionals should foster a culture of empathy, use exploratory research techniques as a springboard for creating concepts, and use a combination of tools to document user sentiment. See the January 18, 2011, “Mastering Emotional Experience Design: Address Customers’ Real Goals” report.

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Companies hoping to engage their customers online should adopt what Forrester calls EED. NikeRunning. com embodies the three principles of EED by focusing on training instead of products, offering content and tools that create a clear brand personality, and engaging users with well-integrated video and tactile experiences. Companies that want to follow NikeRunning.com’s example should find out what’s driving users to their sites in the first place. See the December 7, 2009, “NikeRunning.com: Emotional Experience Design In Practice” report.

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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 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 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.

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Companies want to differentiate products and services by improving customer experience. They also want to cut costs by shifting more customers from human-assisted channels to self-service channels like websites and phone self-service systems. Their dilemma: Even the best-designed automated systems have weaknesses

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that make them inappropriate for supporting many types of customer goals. To deliver effective customer experiences across a portfolio of channels, firms should document their customers’ current behaviors with cross-channel scenario maps and make the most appropriate touchpoints available at each step of the user’s journey. See the October 12, 2006, “Match Channel Capabilities To Customer Goals” report.

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Forrester evaluated the interaction and system capabilities of the iPad for accessing content via its web browser and applications (apps). Both experiences offer somewhat-limited input capabilities but balance that with rich output and interactivity. iPad apps offer more interactivity, richer output, and more proactive guidance than websites. Firms deciding what type of experience to design for the iPad should begin by extending their firm’s iPad product strategy to create the right experience strategy, make their websites easier to use from the iPad, and consider the benefits, risks, and costs. See the February 23, 2011, “Match iPad Experiences To Customer Goals” report.

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As phone features grow more powerful and the number of touchpoints expands, companies need to map their mobile efforts to channels’ strengths and weaknesses in terms of their inherent capabilities for supporting different types of user goals. To design mobile data channels that support user — and business — goals, companies must start by understanding the capabilities of mobile data channels and the goals users want to accomplish and then focus mobile projects on the user goals that different mobile channels are best suited to support.

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Forrester believes that four attributes will characterize the next phase of development of the Web. Online experiences will be: customized by the end user, aggregated at the point of use, relevant to the moment, and social as a rule, not an exception. In this report, we highlight companies that are providing online experiences that already exhibit one or more of these characteristics. To prepare for the future, customer experience professionals should develop multichannel personas, include social media behaviors in ethnographic research, prepare atomized content, establish an environment for testing new experiences, and seek out highly skilled interaction designers. See the January 28, 2010, “The Future Of Online Customer Experience” report.

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At USAA, a new experience called Auto Circle illustrates what the future of online experience will mean for financial services institutions and their customers. Auto Circle allows users to customize their search for a vehicle and obtain accurate insurance and financing costs. It aggregates both expert and user reviews of vehicles as well as pricing data that includes sales data from dealers so that users can find a fair price.

Auto Circle allows members to access this information in the most relevant touchpoint and lets them share and solicit opinions about vehicles from their friends and family via Facebook. Customer experience professionals hoping to learn from USAA’s success should use ethnographic research to find opportunities to deliver experiences that meet customer needs, offer clear brand value, and determine the best approach for building and launching a CARS experience at their firm. See the November 8, 2010, “USAA’s Auto Circle Makes Carbuying Customized, Aggregated, Relevant, And Social” report.

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Expert reviews quickly and efficiently uncover known user experience problems in a product or channel like a website. Similarly, Forrester’s Website Brand Experience Review methodology looks for user experience problems that create negative feelings about a brand by frustrating and annoying customers. In addition, the methodology grades the second major dimension of an online brand: its emotional and experiential aspects.

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A brand experience review does this by examining how well sites communicate brand attributes through the use of content, functionality, language, typography, imagery, layout, relevance, and production values. See the January 13, 2010, “Executive Q&A: Website Brand Experience Reviews” report.

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