The State Of Customer Experience, 2009

Executives have been saying for awhile that customer experience is important. Only recently, however, have many of them begun to understand its direct link with loyalty. As a result, companies are starting to develop more disciplined approaches to customer experience management. But they have a long way to go. When we examined responses to our Experience-Based Differentiation (EBD) self-test, it was clear that many organizations are pretty low on the customer experience maturity scale. That's why there are significant opportunities for improvement, especially when it comes to Web sites — 60% of which failed our evaluations in 2008. So where is customer experience today? In its adolescence. Customer experience management will need nurturing and patience over the next few formative years.