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For Customer Experience Professionals
Why read This report
Companies see substantial business benefit when they systematically hunt down and eliminate customer
experience problems. But eventually they need to stop doing business in ways that create those problems
in the first place. When they do, they’ll both cut costs and boost revenues, improving their bottom lines
by tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars — or more. How can firms transform themselves and
start doing business in a new, more customer-centric way? They can do it by adopting the six disciplines
of customer experience. The main responsibility for driving this adoption falls on customer experience
professionals, who can use this playbook to guide them through the process.
Transform To An Experience-Driven Organization
Executive Overview: The Experience-Driven Organization Playbook
by Harley Manning
with Moira Dorsey and Belle Bocal
May 7, 2012
an undisciplined approach to customer experience drags on business
To achieve the full potential of customer experience as a business strategy, you have to change the way you
run your company. You must manage from the perspective of your customers, and you must do it in a
systematic, repeatable, and disciplined way. Companies that fail to do this face:
■ An endless stream of costly customer service calls. When organizations operate in ways that don’t
put customers at the center of their business, they inadvertently create problems for those customers.
These difficulties range from getting the wrong product from a poorly trained sales rep to getting
the wrong bill from a badly designed back-end system. What do customers do when these problems
occur? They call contact centers — which run up costs for the company when the contact centers bill
the firm by the minute and pay off customers with refunds.
■ Less revenue per customer — and fewer customers over time. Customer experience correlates
strongly to customer willingness to make another purchase. That means that every poor experience a
company delivers runs the risk of turning away the next sale. And because customer experience also
correlates to the likelihood of shifting business to a competitor, that same poor experience might cause
the company to lose a buyer to the competition permanently.
■ Social media nightmares. The quality of customers’ experience also correlates to their willingness
to recommend — or recommend against. Social media touchpoints like Facebook and Twitter
amplify the customer’s ability to broadcast unfavorable opinions to hundreds or even thousands of
connections. The result: One bad experience with the wrong Mass Connector or Mass Maven leads to
a groundswell of bad sentiment.1

2. For Customer Experience Professionals
Transform To An Experience-Driven Organization 2
© 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited May 7, 2012
Companies Profit From Adopting A Disciplined Approach To Customer Experience
When you consistently manage from the outside-in perspective of your customers, you’ll break
out of the endless cycle of chasing after problems you create for yourself. That’s because you’ll
systematically stamp out the root causes of those problems. This new way of doing business will also
create the opportunity for competitive differentiation. Ultimately you’ll be able to achieve:
■ Lower customer service costs. Your contact center can’t stamp out the customer experience
problems that other parts of the business caused in the first place — but customer experience
discipline can. Witness the way that JetBlue Airways’ measurement program takes the
guesswork out of managing the JetBlue experience. It does this by capturing what actually
happened during a customer interaction (such as a flight), how the customer felt about the
interaction, and whether the customer is willing to recommend JetBlue afterward. That tells
employees and partners what’s going right (or wrong), what (if anything) needs to be done
about the situation, and what business impact to expect as a result.2
■ Higher revenue per customer. Customers who have an above-average experience with a
company are more willing to buy again from that company. Virtually all industries feel the sales
impact that results from that fact, but a few stand to benefit even more than others. Wireless
service providers, the largest hotel chains, and airlines see the biggest revenue gains by getting
incremental business from happier customers — hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
■ Improved customer retention. Happier customers who had a better experience are less likely
to shift their business to competitors. Hotels — whose guests have near-zero switching costs
if they decide to stay at a different property in the same town — can see the most revenue
benefit of any industry. When they keep their customers from defecting to the competition by
offering a superior experience, they can realize an extra $825 million annually. Wireless service
providers and insurance providers also stand to gain hundreds of millions of dollars through
better retention. And even banks, credit card providers, and TV service providers can see tens
of millions of dollars of incremental revenue by embracing customer experience discipline.
■ More new customers. If you want to improve your word-of-mouth marketing and drive up
your Net Promoter Score, deliver a better customer experience.3
When more satisfied customers
recommend you to friends who then go on to buy from you, you’ll gain new customers — and
the revenue that comes with them. Hotels, wireless service providers, airlines, insurance
providers, credit card providers, banks, and consumer electronics manufacturers all stand to
gain a minimum of $10 million of additional revenue from those new customers — without
having to spend any marketing dollars to attract them.

3. For Customer Experience Professionals
Transform To An Experience-Driven Organization 3
© 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited May 7, 2012
Use this playbook to guide your customer experience transformation
All mature companies routinely perform a set of sound, standard practices that result in a high-
quality outcome.4
That’s just as true for the accounting firm that does your books as it is for the
utility company that supplies your power. It’s true for manufacturers that want to produce products
with an acceptably low defect rate and for retailers that want to consistently keep their supply chains
flowing and their shelves stocked. That’s the discipline of doing business.
Companies that want to produce a high-quality customer experience also need to routinely perform
a set of sound, standard practices. This playbook explains each of those practices in detail, shows
you why you must adopt them, and walks you through the process of adopting them (see Figure 1).5
The playbook will help you:
1. Discover: what customer experience transformation means to your business. We define
customer experience maturity and its most important practices. That will show you what you
need to do in order to advance down the path to maturity without false starts and missteps.
You’ll also learn about the state of customer experience in business today, which will help you
understand where you’re leading or lagging behind. And to help you grab and hold the attention
of your organization, we’ll show you the potential revenue benefits of improved customer
experience for companies in 12 major industries.
2. Plan: how to create a road map to customer experience maturity. To guide your
transformation effort, you need a vision of the specific customer experience you intend to
deliver. That vision should be embodied in a customer experience strategy — we’ll show you
the best practices for building that strategy. We’ll also tell you who needs to be involved in your
initiative in order to make it a success. And if you’re wondering where to start to accomplish
this potentially overwhelming task, you won’t once we guide you through the process of
assessing your current level of customer experience maturity.
3. Act: how to transform into an experience-driven organization. Transformation requires
strong leadership, so increasingly companies put one executive in charge of leading customer
experience transformation across the enterprise. We’ll describe the three types of organizational
models and help you decide which one is right for you. We’ll also give you real-world examples
of how companies improved their customer experience and whether they started from an
already-strong position or they were trying to dig themselves out of a hole. Regardless of which
of those descriptions fits your situation, we’ve provided a guide of consulting organizations large
and small that can help you achieve your objectives.
4. Optimize: what to do in order to maintain a high level of customer experience maturity.
When you routinely perform the practices described in this playbook, you’ll consistently deliver
the customer experience your organization promises. We’ll help you set up a measurement
program that monitors your progress over time so that you’ll know when you’ve arrived and

4. For Customer Experience Professionals
Transform To An Experience-Driven Organization 4
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© 2012 Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Forrester, Forrester Wave, RoleView, Technographics, TechRankings, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester
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located at www.forrester.com. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. 72461
avoid backsliding. Our Customer Experience Index will tell you how you stack up to others in
your industry and across industries. And to keep control of your ongoing efforts, we’ll provide
guidance on how to measure a portfolio of customer experience improvement projects.
Figure 1 The Experience-Driven Organization Playbook
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.72461
Performance
Management
Assessment OrganizationVision
Strategic
Plan
Best Practices BenchmarksLandscape
Stakeholder
Map
Tools And
Technology
Continuous
Improvement
Business
Case
DISCOVER PLAN ACT OPTIMIZE
Endnotes
1
Mass Connectors are the 6.2% of online adults who create 80% of the influence impressions on social media.
Mass Mavens are the 13.8% of online adults who create 80% of posts, comments, and ratings. See the
December 19, 2011, “Twitter: The Public Forum For Your Brand” report.
2
For more about JetBlue’s customer experience measurement program, check out the upcoming book from
Forrester, Outside In: The Power Of Putting Customers At The Center Of ​​Your Business.
3
Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain, Fred Reichheld, and
Satmetrix Systems. Source: Bain (http://www.bain.com/search.aspx?q=Net+Promoter); Satmetrix Systems
(http://www.satmetrix.com/).
4
If you want to learn more about maturity frameworks, check out the People CMM (Version 2) from the
Software Engineering Institute. Source: Carnegie Mellon University (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/
abstracts/reports/09tr003.cfm).
5
Please refer back to the online document to see the associated reports in the playbook. See the May 7, 2012,
“Transform To An Experience-Driven Organization” report.