Forrester is launching its Customer Experience Index in Australia to help brands and marketers measure their efforts to improve customer experience and link perceptions of what brands deliver to business value.
The CXi has been operating in the US, Europe and China and offers a metric to benchmark how consumers rate their interactions with brands.
Michael Barnes, Forrester’s vice president and research director told AdNews that because customer experience comes down to how an individual perceives that brand, it is hard for brands to measure that.
He said Australian firms want to improve their customer experience, but many are “stuck in the initial stage of repair,”.
Nearly all (98%) Australian companies claim customer experience is a top priority – more than the global average of 92%, according to a survey by Forrester, but delivery doesn’t always match up.
Forrester’s State of Customer Experience Management Australia report found that the focus is on incremental change, rather than large-scale transformation. Customer experience is often a siloed function rather than integrated company-wide.
Barnes added: “The challenge with CX is its perception. Some of it is based on emotions, and some of it is rational. When you’re talking about organisational priorities, you have to be able to measure results. Everything needs to be measured or it’s hard to justify investments or prove that your efforts are affecting positive change. So the CXi is meant to measure the perceptions customers have about companies so that when organisations do something like revamp their website, they can measure the impact in tangible terms.
“Australia is an interesting market, it’s small and saturated and the number of competitors traditionally has been limited so customers are quite knowledgeable in terms of what other offers are available. If you don’t go to Coles you go to Woolies, so from that standpoint there’s a very clear benchmark for what the baseline customer experience should be – that’s different from other markets where there is a large degree of competition and customers are not so well versed in what brands offer.”
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