Customer experience can make or break a company. Whether customer service is very good or very bad, it gets peoples' attention, creates customer loyalty and affects a company's bottom line
Forrester Research launched the U.S. Customer Experience Index as an annual report in 2007. This year, for the first time, the company published it twice, and from now on it will release two reports per year. The company looked at 299 brands in 18 industries.
"The impetus was that companies were increasingly looking to customer experience as a way to set themselves apart and how important it is in terms of customer loyalty,” says Megan Burns, an analyst at Forrester and the report's principle author. “As companies decided to focus on this, they wanted to measure themselves in some way. The problem is there's a disconnect between selling and marketing and what's actually happening."