About Forrester
Forrester Research, Inc. is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology.

Ted serves CIOs. He has 24 years of experience in the technology industry, focusing on the effects of disruptive technologies on the workforce and workforce productivity. His research focuses on workforce technologies and the programs that support them, including smartphones, tablets, and their impact on productivity; social business and collaboration tools; cloud email and collaboration tools; and the consumerization of IT.
Ted is the co-author of Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business (Harvard Business Review Press, September 2010). Social, mobile, video, and cloud Internet services give consumers and business customers more information power than ever before. To win customer trust and business, companies must empower their employees to directly engage with and solve the problems of empowered customers using these same technologies.
It is through this empowered lens that the consumerization of IT makes sense: employees solving customer and business problems using readily available technology that they master first at home — social, mobile, video, and cloud. This management book helps CIOs and IT organizations engage directly with business managers and employees to build an empowered strategy: understanding which employees are workforce "HEROes" — highly empowered and resourceful operatives — implementing empowering collaboration and innovation programs, creating a new empowered security architecture, and supporting HEROes with the right technology platforms.
In 2009, Ted launched Forrester's Workforce Technology Assessment, the industry's first benchmark survey of workforce technology adoption. This quantitative approach helps professionals and the teams they work with have a fact-based conversation about employees' technology adoption and requirements.
Prior to joining Forrester in April 1997, Ted was a cofounder of Phios, an MIT spinoff. Before that, Ted worked for eight years as CTO and director of engineering for a software company serving the healthcare industry. Early in his career, Ted was a singer and bass player for Crash Davenport, a successful Maryland-based rock-and-roll band.
Ted has a master's degree in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He also holds an M.S. in computer science from the University of Maryland and a B.A. with honors in physics from Swarthmore College.
Building A Customer-Centric Culture
Changing from a product-centric company to a customer-centric company requires a cultural transformation. This is no small task. That's because transformation involves changing the beliefs and...

Even companies that make customer experience a strategic priority struggle to implement major long-lasting improvements. That's because they fail to connect behind-the-scenes activities to...
Listening to customers through a well-established voice of the customer (VOC) program is critical. However, without a customer experience strategy rooted in a company strategy, it’s easy for a...
Continuous Improvement: The Customer Experience Ecosystem Playbook
Firms that seek to differentiate based on customer experience must transform the way their companies operate. Customer experience professionals have the tools required to guide this transformation,...

The only way your company will differentiate based on customer experience is if the culture of your organization aligns closely with the brand promise to customers. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh puts it in...
“Customer experience (CX) maturity” was the topic of Forrester’s recent chief customer officer (CCO) roundtable meeting. Based on a recent report by Megan Burns called...
There are a lot of vendors pitching their social media listening capabilities. And, the more that I hear these pitches, the more it has made me think that a bunch of companies jumping on the social...
In our continuing research on the emerging role of the chief customer officer (CCO), we recently looked at the kinds of authority their firms vest in them to drive change across the organization....
I recently updated our research on enterprisewide customer experience leaders, who we refer to as “chief customer officers” or CCOs. While they often don’t have that exact title, we...
Most companies have the intention of providing excellent customer experiences. However, most find it difficult to translate those intentions into the cultural fabric of their companies. I like to...
It’s hard to find a firm that says: 1) We don’t care about customers, and 2) we don’t care about being good corporate citizens. That said, it’s astounding to see companies on...
Adopt An Outside-In Approach To Shift The CRM Mindset
Well-intentioned customer relationship management (CRM) efforts that focus on internal processes and objectives have largely failed to serve the most important stakeholder: the customer. Customer...

A customer-centric culture is a system of shared values and behaviors that focus employee activity on improving the customer experience. Customer experience leaders have three tools they can use to...

Michael Porter famously wrote that companies differentiate themselves by performing a unique set of activities from their competitors' or by performing the same activities differently. Here...
Like it or not, government services face many of the same pressures that companies face. Companies like Amazon.com, USAA, Disney, and Zappos.com raise customer expectations when they deliver stellar...
Increasingly, companies appoint a chief customer officer (CCO) to lead the company in orchestrating a differentiated customer experience. But these senior executives must often navigate uncharted...
Business-to-business (B2B) firms have largely ignored customer experience — and it shows. Three separate studies that Forrester Research conducted over the past year indicate that B2B customers...

Many different types of firms have channel partners or others that control a significant part of the actual experience with customers. Automobile companies have dealers, insurance and real estate...
Strategic Plan: The Experience-Driven Organization Playbook
This report is an update to "Innovative Customer Experience Strategies" originally published on August 22, 2011. It outlines the strategic plan for customer experience professionals planning to...
