On November 11th, we had a webcast addressing how companies can use social data to improve the customer experience and engagement. We discussed:
- The importance of customer experience: Forrester’s Customer Experience research shows that over 60% of companies received a score of OK, poor, or very poor from their customers.
- How leading customer experience companies like ESPN, Lucky, All Recipies, and Kantar build engaging experiences.
- What companies can do to start moving forward in this area.
Before launching into the content, we asked the attendees two questions:
- How evolved is your engagement strategy?
- What is your biggest area for improvement in 2014?
Below are the results for each of the questions.
Regarding the level of evolution, it was good to see alignment between customer perceptions (64% OK or lower) and the attendees’ perception of their own status (>60% in the lower two “boxes”). This leads me to believe that the situation will improve over time, i.e., companies will not rest on non-existent laurels. They understand that they have to improve. With the right social media analysis processes to find insights (developing insights around what is important to the customer when assessing the experience), and the right tools to monitor and format social media data (like Kantar does on their site) they will be set up for success in 2014.
The surprising thing about the focus areas was the relative lack of a clear winner. There are a lot of things that need to happen for a company to be able to execute on their customer experience vision. Based on this data, it appears that the first thing companies should do is to determine what to do first. That will vary from company to company. I do not see any silver bullet based on our poll results.
