How important is Customer Experience for today’s business?

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Forrester principal analyst Megan Burns kicked off this year’s “Forum for Customer Experience Professionals” with a little trek up Mount Everest.

“Customer experience is a goal of Everest-like proportions for many companies today,” she told the audience of 1,400 in the Broadway Ballroom of the Marriott Marquis, in New York City. Burns is also the author of Forrester’s Sixth Annual Customer Experience Index (CXi), which provides insight into how more than 7,500 U.S. consumers ranked their experiences with more than 150 large U.S. brands, across 14 different industries. (Click here for access to the report; registration required.)

Customer experience (CX), for most enterprises, is still at a low level of maturity, said Burns, explaining that firms must get on a clear path to high CX maturity if they are to be successful. According to Forrester, to excel at customer experience, “organizations must routinely perform certain practices that are required to design, implement, and manage customer experience in a disciplined way.” To that end, Burns outlined a four-phase path for companies to take: repair, elevate, optimize, and differentiate.

In the repair phase, companies must first stop the avalanche of bad experiences. During the elevate phase, Burns suggested firms must adopt practices that make good CX behavior the norm for their companies. With optimize, companies must begin to adapt practices that will create more sophisticated CX toolkits, while modeling relationships between customer experience and business results. Finally, in the differentiate phase—where companies can be “catapulted to the very top” if they are willing to think differently to act differently—business as usual is not enough.

Concluded Burns: “While the entrance to the beginning of the trek up Everest is well-marked, the entrance to CX maturity is not.” However, she explained, there are four ways to get on the path and move ahead: Explain the path to all concerned; manage expectations—you have to crawl before you can run; locate yourself and your company on the CX map; secure your current position; and clearly plan each phase of the climb.