The CX Cast

How well do leading brands build loyalty with the quality of their customer experience (CX)? This year, Forrester revealed the complete rankings of all 314 brands across 21 industries in the US CX Index. Principal Analyst Rick Parrish joins us in this episode to discuss the the surprising trends in CX quality and the role that emotion plays in CX.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.

Referenced Forrester Research:

"The Canada Customer Experience Index, 2017"

"The US Customer Experience Index, 2017"

Customers expect personalized experiences but most companies fail to deliver. And that is especially true for conversational interfaces. In this episode, Senior Analyst Jenny Wise talks about the expectations of a human-like interaction and where the technology for conversational interfaces (e.g., Amazon Alexa) needs to advance.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.

Relevant Research:

"Q&A: Why Emerging Technologies Require Interaction Design"

"Pivot To Person-First Personalization"

Unless your customers' experiences leave them with lasting memories of positive emotions, you will struggle to drive loyalty behaviors among customers. In this episode, PA Ryan Hart tells us about the paradox that easier, frictionless experiences are often less memorable. He explains how companies can ensure salience by designing interactions that heighten anticipation, evoke specific emotional responses, and then make it easier for customers to remember their positive emotions.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.

Referenced Forrester research:

"The Dawn Of Anticipatory CX"

"Customers Need A Reason To Remember You"

Your customers demand different improvements to the customer experience and maybe you have ideas about how to address those. But how do you juggle the demands of higher revenue-generating customers with those of other customer segments? And what about the long-term vs. short-term gains? Principal Analyst Ryan Hart joins us to explain how to create a prioritization framework to help ensure that improvements to the customer experience align to business success.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.

Relevant Forrester research:

"Brief: When To Rethink Even A Successful CX Strategy"

"Why And How To Lead A CX Transformation"

Mapping B2B customer journeys is undoutbedly a trickier proposition than mapping B2C customer journeys. On this week's episode of CX Cast, Tony Costa and TJ Keitt join us to describe the complexity of mapping B2B customer journeys, the different roles within clients - buyers, users, influencers - and the different roles on the delivery side - employees, partners, sales & success management - just to name a few. They also tell us how to overcome these challenges.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.

Relevant Forrester Research:

The Top 5 Challenges To Mapping B2B Customer Journeys

The 7 Steps Of Highly Effective Journey Mapping

Customer experience (CX) transformation efforts bring benefits like increased customer retention and greater cross-sell opportunity. To get those benefits, CX transformation leaders need to invest in areas like training, technology, and professional services. Do the benefits of CX transformation outweigh the costs and result in positive ROI? And how can you make that determination for your company? In this episode, we discuss how to calculate the benefits, cost, and ROI of an enterprisewide CX transformation and use the resulting ROI model to fuel a winning business case for CX transformation.

For more detailed guidance and examples of how to build an ROI model for CX transformation, see the "The ROI Of CX Transformation" Forrester report. This report also contains a downloadable excel model.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.

Around the world, organizations' customer experiences have been faltering. In this episode, Principal Analyst Rick Parrish and Researcher Dylan Czarnecki join us to discuss global trends in Forrester's Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) data from 2015 and 2016. 

If you want to dig deeper into the data and see Forrester's advice for how organizations can improve CX, we recommend you see the "Global Customer Experience Trends, 2017" Forrester report.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.

Dayton Semerjian of CA Technologies returns to reflect on his past four years of progress in developing a CX program and shares valuable lessons learned from the very beginning of building a business case.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.

Relevant Forrester research:

"Improving CX Through Business Discipline Drives Growth"

"Outside In"

"The ROI Of CX Transformation"

In this episode, Dayton Semerjian of CA Technologies joins us to discuss what led to the technology company launching its CX transformation effort and how they got started with establishing a CX program.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.

Relevant research:

"Improving CX Through Business Discipline Drives Growth"

"Outside In"

"The ROI Of CX Transformation"

When scripts and protocol don't apply, perceived barriers hinder employees' from making the right decision for customers. We welcome back Laure Park of Quest Diagnostics to explain how they signaled to employees that it was okay to deviate from standard procedures, with good judgement. And to CX pros just getting started on the journey of CX transformation, Laure shares a couple notes about what she'd do differently from the get-go. This is part 2 of a two-part series. If you haven't listened to episode 100, we highly encourage you to do so before listening to this episode.

Listeners, we'd love to get to know you! Whether you just want to say hi or share a CX story, send us an email.

Relevant research:

"Remove Barriers And Add Enablers For A Customer-Centric Culture"

This report provides detailed guidance on how firms can make it easier to adopt and maintain customer-centric behaviors by removing barriers to employee behavior change and creating new processes and support structures that build rigor and routine.