According to The Planning Guide 2024, Forrester’s latest customer experience report, 64% of customer experience leaders expect a budget increase in 2024. If this is to happen, there’ll be increased scrutiny of the ROI from this budgetary increase, posing increased challenges for the customer experience team.
Modern customer experience is data-driven. Management needs data-backed insights to understand what they can improve in their processes or products to yield better customer service. This is why research companies such as Forrester exist.
Forrester is an advisory company offering research, consulting, and other services to help companies make better customer experience decisions.
On the Modern Customer, I talked to Pete Jacques,Ph.D., a principal customer experience analyst at Forrester, about Forrester’s recent report and we discussed that it’s critical for customer experience leaders to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Here’s a brief look into what we talked about.
Pete Jacques History
In his role at Forrester, Pete Jacques stands as an authority in customer experience research, with intimate knowledge of gathering data and insights and making it relevant to the practitioner, given the nuances of running a business in the industry.
Customer Experience Leaders Need to Think Budget and ROI
One thing that stands out with modern customer experience is that it’s up-leveled to the boardroom. CEOs and executives are paying closer attention to customer experience than they did years back.
While this is great for customers and businesses, Pete remarks that it presents a new challenge for customer experience leaders.
He said, “I think this is a very critical time for these leaders to really be able to demonstrate their value work at being able to more closely link to ROI.”
As executives allocate budget for customer experience improvements, given the tight economic environment, CX leaders must show the value of the insights and changes they drive within the organization.
Companies Should Stop Getting Stuck in Analysis Paralysis
Pete said that while budget has been a big problem, the bigger ROI problem for companies is analysis paralysis. Budget allocations should not just be put towards gathering data. Companies need to purposefully act on this data, finding connections and actionable ways to improve customer experience instead of continuously just gathering data and analysis.
Once customer experience leaders learn how to show their value to the company’s bottom line, the board will be less reluctant to give them more money to improve customer experience, yielding more returns for the business.
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Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist and the bestselling author of The Customer of the Future. For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here.