Customer Engagement

•  B2B organizations are becoming more focused on creating a great customer experience, but the path to improvement may not be clear
• Even though employees are key to creating a great customer experience, there is often no team chartered with supporting their needs
• To enable employees to be good on-brand communicators and experts at delivering the right customer experience, leaders at every level must reinforce their value

• The SiriusStars blog series provides an inside look at how select high-performing clients use SiriusDecisions research and analyst inquiry to increase revenue, meet and exceed goals, and transform their organizations
• In this edition, we feature Regan Yeldell, senior marketing director of demand generation at Comcast Business
• We chatted with Regan about her typical day, her favorite SiriusDecisions model or framework, and her tips for success for marketing leaders with similar goals

Customer experience leaders grow revenue faster than CX laggards, drive higher brand preference, and can charge more for their products. Based on a survey of more than 110,000 US adult customers in 2018, Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) methodology measures how well a brand’s customer experience strengthens the loyalty of its customers so that […]

When Piloting Colocation, Measure Impact To Location, Customers, And Operations It’s been interesting to see creative real estate colocation ideas such as the recently announced pilot for ALDI in 10 Kohl’s stores. As Kevin Mansell, former CEO of Kohl’s, explained, “We believe the opportunity to leverage our real estate through this effort has benefits.”[1] But […]

• A great brand captures the essence of what an organization stands for in an authentic way that’s relevant and differentiated for its key audiences
• For many organizations, however, the brand becomes muddled because employees don’t know or don’t care about it – leading to inconsistent and frustrating customer experiences
• At Summit 2018, Julie Ogilvie and Lisa Nakano showed how to use the SiriusDecisions Brand Experience Navigator to build an integrated customer, employee and brand experience

It is such a pleasure to be back at Forrester, especially now when our firm is actively embracing and helping you, our customers, leverage new technologies to innovate and differentiate your business. After three years leading technology strategy and market development for Microsoft Azure and Equinix, what brought me back were three things: The value […]

You have to feel bad for marketers: For years, they’ve tried to keep pace with changing buyer behaviors and adapt to the cross-device and cross-channel habits of their customers. To guide their progress, they’ve fallen back on familiar routines: benchmarking against past performance, optimizing short-term results, and pushing people through the sales funnel. The problem […]

• Interest is high in customer advocacy as technology advances and the buyer’s journey evolves
• Attendees at Summit 2018 will find a heavy dose of customer advocacy–related content
• Guidance on customer advocacy includes building a business case, narrowing down technology options and infusing structure into program planning

• All factories, regardless of their end products, must manage a mix of resources, raw materials and process constraints
• B2B content factory teams face increased complexity as they work to support requirements associated with new audiences, assets and channels
• The SiriusDecisions Content Factory Model, to debut at SiriusDecisions Summit 2018, provides a construct for optimizing content factory operations

• There are various data types and sources available to marketing leaders for post-sale customer engagement purposes
• Choosing and leveraging the right data depends on which phases of the customer lifecycle your organization is addressing
• At SiriusDecisions Summit this year, John Donlon and Kristin Farwell will discuss a method to identify data necessary for post-sale engagement

• Advanced technology capabilities and higher B2B consumer expectations have led to more complex content strategy requirements
• Different content strategy approaches are needed for content marketing, campaign content and Web site content
• B2B content leaders need to facilitate cross-functional collaboration for an audience-centric content strategy across these three areas

• B2B marketing leaders invest in customer engagement to drive profitability through insight into customer needs, increased retention and upsell opportunities, and customer advocacy
• A successful customer engagement function requires supporting infrastructure that carries insights and interactions from the buyer’s journey into the customer lifecycle
• Learn how to build a best-in-class customer engagement tech stack at this year’s SiriusDecisions Summit

• Even with convincing evidence that customer engagement matters to the business, practitioners may find it hard to get started
• Summit 2018 provides attendees with a wealth of customer engagement best practices, from basic frameworks to a new model for advocacy
• Learn how to connect the dots between engagement and brand and ensure employees are aligned on the brand experience they are meant to deliver

The world is changing and with it, consumers’ expectations of experiences and communication from brands. The paradigm for customer engagement is shifting from large, monolithic experiences that serve everyone to smaller, more contextual experiences served to consumers in just the moment they need them. Marketers must adopt the right strategy, operational best practices and technology […]

• Turning engaged customers into a powerful army of advocates requires a different strategy, skill set and type of technology support than standard reference programs
• Even enthusiastic practitioners struggle with building a business case and prioritizing the program components for customer advocacy
• A framework for advocate development and activation should consider the objectives of the company and potential advocates

Like a football team captain at a junior high dance, Amazon just sauntered up to a big group of people and started dropping hints about its sweet moves on the dance floor . . . Okay, that’s not exactly what’s happening here, but it sure felt like that to many bank executives who heard the […]

Chatting, by definition, is meaningless, trivial talk – but web “chatting” is anything but; it is starting to transform digital customer experiences. And it works. Customers want to use chat. Forty-five percent have used it to interact with a live agent in 2017. The companies that get it are moving towards a holistic chat strategy […]

On March 12, Salesforce announced its intent to acquire CloudCraze, a B2B eCommerce application. This savvy and long-anticipated move nicely rounds out its broad CRM portfolio and supports B2B customers through their engagement journey. This eCommerce application is a fundamentally different one than Salesforce’s  B2C eCommerce acquisition of Demandware. This is because B2C engagement is […]

  Retailers recognize and are investing in the link between great associate experiences and great customer experiences. They are enhancing the employee’s ability to engage customers better by providing training and education, implementing technologies to make the associate’s job easier, and some retailers like Walmart are even increasing associate wages. Retailers understand that by creating […]