Recently, I came across a great quote by Kerry Bodine of Forrester Research, Inc. where she said, “Companies need to start treating customer experience as a business discipline—not a bumper sticker.” It made me wonder if companies, as they start planning their strategy for 2012, are truly embracing what it means to build a customer-centric culture.
Working in the customer experience industry, weekly I meet with numerous Fortune 500 organizations. I am always surprised to hear comments like, “this year we are focusing on our customers first and foremost” or “we have just hired a new senior director to really lead our customer experience initiative.” For many of these companies, they are just starting to embark on the customer experience improvement journey. A 2011 study from the Temkin Group shows only 7% of companies think they are customer experience leaders while 61% of them want to be at the top in their industry in three years. The question I ask then is, “Why now?” Haven’t you always been concerned about your customers?
