About Forrester
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Shar serves Marketing Leadership professionals. She is a leading expert on how businesses can leverage interactive marketing channels and technologies to drive sales and deepen customer relationships. During her 12 years with Forrester, Shar has been instrumental in the development of many of the company's interactive marketing program evaluation methodologies, training courses, and marketing planning tools and has also been part of Forrester's sales and consulting organizations.
Shar's research focuses on overall interactive marketing strategies; crafting efficient, effective interactive programs; organizing for interactive marketing; and integrating interactive channels into the rest of the marketing mix. Specific subjects addressed in Shar's research include email marketing, online advertising, search engine marketing, ad serving and targeting, interactive budgeting and forecasts, and interactive marketing organizational models.
Shar returned to Forrester in 2004 after several years away working in marketing consulting. Shar served as research director for marketing research boutique, TideWatch, where she led internal strategy efforts and client strategy projects. Shar was also a consultant with Carlson Marketing Group's Business Strategy Consulting team, developing CRM and email programs for clients including British Airways, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, and Home Depot. Shar began her career at Forrester in 1997 during the early days of the Internet and has written research on customer loyalty, ad networks, and marketing measurement and planning.
A popular speaker, Shar has been seen on stage at ad:tech, MITX, DMA, and the Email Service Provider Coalition events, among others. She is on the board of SEMPO — the search engine marketing professionals organization — and is also widely quoted in the press including such media outlets as BusinessWeek, Fortune, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal and is a frequent guest on CNBC and National Public Radio.
Shar is a graduate of Harvard University.

Lessons Learned From 35 Website User Experience Reviews Across Six Industries
In 2010, Forrester reviewed the website user experience of sites in six industries: banks (Canadian and US), discount retailers, health plans, marketing software vendors, PC laptop manufacturers, and...
Oh, look what came in the mail yesterday: The order I tried desperately to cancel last week. But, no, UPS dropped it off, and the packing slip said nicely, “Thank you for your order! We are...
Voice of the customer (VoC) data is alluring. Once you start to collect customer feedback, there's always something more you could be gathering. You think: What else can I learn? What else are...
After evaluating two categories of enterprise feedback management (EFM) vendors in Q3 2011, Forrester will no longer cover the vendor market landscape in the same way. This report explains why the...
Web site design case studies and consulting projects provide convincing evidence that when European companies fix known Web site usability problems — like those in Forrester's Web Site User...
Since 1999, Forrester has used its Website User Experience Review methodology to evaluate the user experience of 1,500 websites spanning business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B)...

What are some best practices for online lead generation forms? Where do you place them on a website (e.g., left navigation versus right navigation)? How does certain placement affect the customer...
Expert evaluations test user scenarios and then evaluate the experience based on a set of heuristics. To get the best results from these evaluations, customer experience professionals need to craft...
Forrester Applies Its Web Site User Experience Review Methodology To Four Wireless Carriers
Forrester evaluated the Web site user experience of the four largest US wireless carriers: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless. Overall scores were mediocre: No site received a passing...
By Maxie Schmidt-Subramanian and Adele Sage Allow us to paint a vision of the future for you: After interactions with your favorite companies, no one asks you how you liked...
Where will you be at 5:20 p.m. on Tuesday, June 26th? I know where I’ll be: announcing the winners of Forrester’s annual Voice Of The Customer Awards at Forrester’s Customer...
Good news for those of you requesting extensions: We heard you, and we're extending the deadline for Forrester's Voice Of The Customer Award submissions to Friday, April 6th at 5:00 p.m. ET....
It’s that time of year again. We’re already in the midst of planning our annual Customer Experience Forum, and now we’re gearing up to collect and evaluate nominations for our Voice...
Time To Get Serious About Social Voice Of The Customer
Most consumers have gotten poor service at some point in the past year. Among that group, the vast majority told friends or family about their disappointing experiences. To understand the causes of...
There’s no question that executive support can make or break a voice of the customer (VoC) program. With an executive (or several) onboard, VoC teams can get the funding and tools that they...
Customer experience professionals had already told us that they were planning many large digital design projects in 2011. This time around, we asked Forrester's Customer Experience Peer Research...
Customer experience professionals use metrics to monitor the quality of their website customer experience and find ways to improve it. A good measurement system includes metrics that capture three...
To help customer experience professionals estimate how far their Web site metrics are likely to advance as a result of improvements in the customer experience, we aggregated data on the impact of 60...
This document provides guidance on how to score an application experience against the 20 questions in Forrester's Application User Experience Review and is intended to be used in conjunction with the...