Obstacles To Customer Experience Success, 2008

In a survey of 287 customer experience decision-makers from large US firms, 91% said that customer experience would be either very important or critical to their 2008 efforts — a significant jump over results in a similar survey last year. We also found that customer experience is equally important across larger and smaller firms. While customer experience is increasing in importance, less than half of the respondents have a senior executive in charge of customer experience across products and channels and a single set of customer feedback scores that are used across the company. The two major obstacles identified by these firms are the lack of a clear strategy and the lack of cooperation across organizations. Given the importance of customer experience in 2008, we recommend that firms infuse the voice of the customer, assign a customer experience executive leader, and chart a course toward Experience-Based Differentiation (EBD).