Samuel Stern

Amazon’s New Echo Lineup Does What Fire Phone Never Could Remember when Amazon created a new phone, hoping it could revolutionize the smartphone business? Remember how badly that failed? This week, Amazon released new products that prove it doesn’t need a smartphone to get up close and personal with its most engaged customers, who now […]

Leaders, employees, and consumers will grapple with fitting the gig culture into familiar frameworks that steer business decisions.

Most companies devote so much time and attention to surveying employees that they overlook other sources of insights. What’s more, they fail to use the insights they do collect to make employee experience (EX) improvements. That’s why Sam Stern and I published a new report called “EX Measurement Best Practices: New Data Sources, New Insights, […]

An Oklahoma court ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay $571M for involvement in “false, misleading, and dangerous marketing campaigns” that contributed to the state’s opioid crisis. Here’s both a risk and brand perspective on why business leaders should care. J&J Shares Recover — But Its Reputation May Not Our Security & Risk Analysts Alla Valente […]

Leaders of the largest U.S. companies have vowed to redefine the role of business in society. Putting the words into action will require taking a long, hard look at current practices and planning meaningful but difficult steps.

The Great Gender Blur And Its Impact On The Future Of Marketing Marketing stands at the threshold of a monumental cultural shift — the great gender blur. The male-female binary and all its associated tropes that have pervaded brand marketing for decades are on shaky ground. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the UK’s independent advertising […]

Enterprises have heard their employees’ calls for increased flexibility, and now more than 25% of US information workers work from home at least weekly. But with subpar technology solutions and little face-to-face interaction, home or remote workers end up frustrated and out of the loop. Video provides a platform to engage, train, and communicate effectively […]

Before an organization undertakes any transformation, restructuring, or automation initiative, it needs to ask: What do our employees need to become so that they can thrive in an environment with more chaos and uncertainty? That’s because any change initiative creates fear, uncertainty, and doubt amidst your employees. Will I lose my job? Will I still […]

Facebook’s Planned “Coin” — Much Ado About We-Don’t-Know-What Given Facebook’s 2.4 billion monthly active users, any move the company makes is noteworthy. Put Facebook and cryptocurrency in the same sentence, and you’re guaranteed headlines. In reality, we still don’t know exactly what or when Facebook is planning to launch — possibly in early 2020 and […]

The C-suite sets a strategy. Employees are excited and enthusiastic. Yet, progress isn’t made. Learn why the skills transfer gap could be stymieing your firm’s strategic ambitions.

What will your humans do in an automated workplace? Principal Analyst Sam Stern explains three principles for seamless human-machine collaboration. Watch now and learn more at CX NYC June 11-12.

Is There A Resurgence For The CIO Role? For years, the CIO role looked like it had been moving toward “chief infrastructure officer,” with many executives feeling like the transformative part of their job had been carved out and handed to chief digital officers. We have always been dubious that CDOs without deep technology expertise […]

Just over a year ago, I was talking with my colleague Jenny Wise after she had returned from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. While we were talking about some of the virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) applications she had seen demonstrated at the event, it sparked a realization for us that the opportunity for altered […]

We get asked all the time: Who is responsible for employee experience? What are their titles, budgets, team sizes, and responsibilities? We aim to please at Forrester, so we surveyed and interviewed dozens of EX leaders to get answers to our clients’ questions.

Last month, my colleague Dave Johnson and I published a report that shared a better way for companies to measure the quality of their employee experience. The Employee Experience Index rests on years of research by Dave and myself but also incorporates findings from academic studies that update what we know about what makes a […]

Companies and executives are paying attention to employee experience as never before. There are good reasons for this attention. Chief among them is the historically low unemployment rate, which gives employees options that they are taking advantage of. Employees are quitting their jobs at the fastest rate since 2001.[i] What’s more, companies that care about […]

There is ample evidence that improving employee experience leads to better business results. Briefly, firms that improve employee experience find that they get better work performance and more discretionary effort from employees.[i] Discretionary effort makes companies more effective and efficient, according to this study published in Harvard Business Review.[ii] Better employee experience also leads to lower employee turnover […]

In Episode 154 of The CX Cast (subscribe!), we were excited to have our colleague, Principal Analyst Emily Collins, join us to talk about loyalty programs and their influence on customer experience. Here are five things I learned during our conversation:  Airlines started it. Loyalty programs started 30-plus years ago in the airline industry as a reaction to deregulation. Without strict […]

Tying CX performance to monetary incentives backfires. Every time. Often in spectacular, unforeseen ways. And while we have seen some firms take the leap into a world without monetary CX incentives, tying accountability for CX to money is still a common shortcut in CX transformations. Unfortunately, that weakens employee morale and creates bad CX. In […]