So what’s keeping you awake at night?

Leading research analyst Forrester has just published a new report on Customer Experience Executives Top Priorities for 2010 and reckon they are coming out of ‘crisis mode’ and establishing long-term strategies to combine customer needs with standard business practices

Forrester's conversations with customer experience executives uncovered a new level of maturity for this essential role. In their early days, these executives focused on building their customer experience practices, gaining visibility and momentum, and fixing problems. Now they are coming out of crisis mode to establish long-term strategies and management processes. They are infusing customer needs into standard business processes, driving employee behaviour change, and doing more with available customer data.

This shift is clearly reflected in the two most common areas of focus for this year: defining clear strategies and developing repeatable management processes. Other common efforts include infusing customer experience into standard business processes, aligning employees by tying compensation to customer experience metrics, and taking more action in response to available customer data.

Forrester sees this shift as a sign that customer experience is rapidly maturing, largely driven by the emergence of the chief customer officer (CCO) as a key leadership role within many organizations. As existing CCOs gain influence and other firms see the financial and competitive advantages of strong customer experience leadership, we expect this trend to become even stronger. According to the Forrester research key imperatives for now and beyond include

· Crafting clear visions and strategies. Executives are now trying to define the ultimate goals of their efforts and lay out paths to those goals. The head of customer experience at one consumer product manufacturer said, “We are developing a consumer strategy that we never had before. We need a clear strategy to make sure we don’t do the wrong things or set the wrong tone.” Some of the firms we talked to have already completed their vision statements and even identified success metrics. For example, a large telecom company set a goal of becoming the industry leader in customer experience. The firm’s customer experience executive defined success as winning the industry’s J.D. Power and Associates customer service award.

· Building structured project prioritization processes. After focusing their early efforts on generating visibility and momentum, many customer experience executives have become victims of their own success. As the executive at a large North American insurer told us, “Now we have capacity problems rather than demand problems.” To cope, customer experience executives need to actively manage their project portfolios. Forrester has defined four key characteristics of effective project prioritization frameworks: clarity, simplicity, balance, and flexibility. Embracing these attributes helps customer experience executives tease out the best performing projects without burning out or suffering analysis paralysis. For example, Sprint simplifies its focus by prioritizing projects that drive down calls to customer care.

 · Infusing customer experience into existing business processes. Beyond their own project management processes, the customer experience executives we interviewed have started tapping into the standard business processes occurring outside of their groups. For example, the executive at a global financial services firm has begun adding customer experience considerations to the company’s standard project management process. The firm will now review customer research during project development to bake customer needs into offerings from the beginning. It will also collect customer feedback during implementation to gauge customer reactions before new offerings go to market. Likewise, the customer experience leader at a large US bank said that the firm will apply customer experience findings from a recent corporate merger to the firm’s new product launches.

· Engaging employees with better tools and training. Customer experience executives are trying to get employees to change how they interact with customers by connecting customer experience to specific employee behaviors. For example, a US telecom company is adding customer experience best practices to frontline employee playbooks. Similarly, a large auto insurer has started to document customer experience standards for every area of responsibility throughout the company — even for the 80% of the employees who don’t directly interact with customers. To further engage employees, customer experience executives are also looking for better employee tools to enable customer-centric decisions. The customer experience leader at a global financial services firm has targeted the company’s intranet as a key opportunity for improvement.

 · Rewarding customer-centric behaviours. Most of the executives we interviewed already have companywide customer experience metrics in place to measure performance. Now they are aligning employees around those metrics with financial incentives. For example, one large US insurer has tied employee 401(k) matches to the company’s customer loyalty index. Some firms are taking a more radical approach by actively turning over their employee base. For example, a global financial services firm has started hiring fewer seasoned bankers and more people who display customer-centric attitudes. An online entertainment company has begun asking managers who openly resist customer experience efforts to move on.

 · Doing more with existing customer insights. The executives we talked to admit that they aren’t taking full advantage of customer insights to inform decisions across their organizations. That’s why they are focusing on doing more with the insights they currently have. A large US bank has started building a central data repository across channels and lines of business in order to help different departments tap into the full breadth of available information. A large auto insurer is vying for “transparency of customer insights” by building awareness of customer data capabilities and developing better reporting tools to put the data in the right hands. Already, the firm has created a program where every employee can dial into a 1-800 number to hear call centre recordings. This insurer is also developing better case management capabilities to quickly route negative customer feedback and speed up service recovery.

 · Increasing delight as well as decreasing frustration. Customer experience executives are also focusing on more than fixing what’s broken. A large telecom company has nearly reached parity with its competitors by fixing customer experience problems. Now the firm’s customer experience executive is developing ways to give high-value customers even better experiences.

For example, the company will update the “virtual queue” that employees use to manage customers in stores. The new interface will clearly identify loyalty program members and instruct employees to provide them with faster service. A Canadian financial services firm changed its account management practices for high-value clients to give them a higher-touch experience including more attention from senior managers.

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