Forrester on Customer Experience

Forrester: Are you a leader in customer experience? Nominate your company for Forrester's Voice Of The Customer Award http://snipurl.com/g1a7i #FCXP09

Experience: Customer experience? Who's the customer? What's the definition of experience? Is this customer experience movement a similar experience of customer relationship management?

Forrester: Customer experience? What's the definition of experience? There is no standard, agreed upon definition of customer experience. There are some decent ones out there vying for acceptance, though. Here is one from Bruce Temkin's blog that we like: "The perception that customers have of their interaction with an organization." Or you could go with Wikipedia: "Customer experience is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods or services, over the duration of their relationship." Those two are pretty compatible, although I prefer Bruce’s version.

Who's the customer? Depends on the organization. For Wal-Mart it’s mostly consumers. For Oracle it’s mostly people at businesses. For the I.R.S. it’s mostly taxpayers. For NGOs it’s mostly donors. That’s a slight over simplification but I’m sure you get the idea: Customers are the humans your organization serves.

Is this customer experience movement a similar experience of customer relationship management? Customer experience and CRM are related but not the same. If you want to learn more about customer experience – and you’re not a Forrester client – you might want to go to Bruce Tenkin’s blog: http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/ If you are a Forrester client just go to the site, click Change My Role (a hyperlink near the top of the page) and select Customer Experience Professional.

Experience: Thank you for writing back... at least someone from Forrester is listening. That's an important first step.

I find it difficult to accept your definition of expereince. Bruce Temkin is a consultant of Forrester, so I won't take his definition. And wiki... I rather check the defintion from dictionaries.

For the defintion of customer, there are basically 2 types: internal and external. For internal, there are at least 3 layers: subordinate, staff, superior. Or we can refer to the Leadership Pipleline model developed by Drotter, where there are at least 5 layers. For external, you could go from B2B, B2C, B2B2C, B2G, NGO, SE... or simply follow the SIPOC model where you consider not only the demand side but also supply.

What's the defintion of relationship? What's the relationship between relationship and touchpoint? How does experience relate to touchpoint/relationship?

Try not to sell your stuff to the market. Instead, try to understand how the market thinks.