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For Customer Experience Professionals
Why Read This Report
Today’s multichannel customers demand better experiences than they get from firms that design
underperforming one-off touchpoints. Faced with an expanding ecosystem of legacy websites, mobile
sites, and apps, firms need a plan that will help them align their investments with their customers’ most
pressing needs. How can they do this? They can accomplish this by taking a user-centered approach to
understanding the needs and behaviors of their multichannel customers and filling in the experience
gaps. Customer experience professionals can use this playbook to help their firms develop a road map for
improving the effectiveness and cohesiveness of their digital touchpoints.
Improve Your Digital Customer Experience
Executive Overview: The Digital Customer Experience Improvement
Playbook
by Ron Rogowski
with Harley Manning and Allison Stone
June 25, 2012
Poor Digital Experiences Leave money on the table
More than ever, digital touchpoints are critical to business success.1
Customers have an array of options for
interacting with your company whenever and wherever they like. But when digital touchpoints frustrate
customers, companies:
■ Send customers to higher-cost channels — or worse, to competitors. What do people do when they
can’t complete their goals in their channel of choice? If you’re lucky, they try another channel, raising
their frustration level and your costs. If you’re not lucky, your customers will switch their business to
a competitor with better-designed digital touchpoints.
■ Dilute their brands. Firms need to prove their value to customers while making it easy and enjoyable
for their customers to do business with them. When you’re difficult to work with, customers lose faith
in your brand. Worse, today’s customers can express their displeasure through social channels where
their amplified voices can make their network of friends also lose faith in your brand.
(Sometimes-Small) Digital Improvements Pay Off
Companies need to be smart about how they spend their money on digital design projects. By honing in
on key moments of truth in their customers’ most important journeys, you can uncover problems that
are often simple to fix. At the same time, you’ll gain insights that can help you design solutions that move
customers along the path to achieving their goals. Relentless focus on how customers behave leads to:
■ Higher conversion rates. When you make it easy for people to find what they want, they’ll do more
business with you. It’s that simple. Even if your digital touchpoints aren’t intended to sell directly,
when prospects get the answers to their questions and can see how to take next steps, they move
further down the purchase funnel and closer to becoming paying customers.

2. For Customer Experience Professionals
Improve Your Digital Customer Experience 2
© 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited June 25, 2012
■ Lower cost of sales and service. Customers often want to help themselves. When your digital
touchpoints provide clear answers to their questions, they can do just that — and avoid
moving to costlier channels. For more intricate processes like business-to-business (B2B)
sales where multiple parties look for information specific to their roles, well-designed digital
touchpoints can shorten the time and reduce the effort required to close a sale.
■ Engaged customers. When you remove the obstacles that get in the way of customers’
goals, you increase the likelihood that they’ll come back for more and further cement their
relationship with your brand. And if the experience is as enjoyable as it is easy to use, you’ll earn
what money can’t buy: word of mouth and social referrals that can enhance your reputation.
Use This Playbook To Drive Digital CX Improvements
This playbook explains the benefits of putting customers at the center of a digital customer
experience (CX) initiative, demonstrates how to prioritize your investments, shows you how to
implement changes, and explains how to measure results (see Figure 1).2
The following steps will
help you deliver the right digital CX:
1. Discover: how user-centered design can pay off. We define a process for developing a deep
behavioral understanding of your customers’ goals, aspirations, and needs. This insight will help
you develop an empathetic approach to multichannel design. You will learn about the business
benefits of making digital CX enhancements as well as how to build a model you can use to
make the business case for making improvements.
2. Plan: how to determine the investments that matter most. To determine the most high-impact
investments, this playbook will equip you with the tools you need to develop your digital CX
strategy. It will show you how to match business goals and brand objectives to customer needs.
It will also lead you through the process of prioritizing changes and building a road map for
your most critical initiatives.
3. Act: how to deliver on customer needs. Executing your digital CX strategy requires a high-
performing organization. We’ll show you how digital CX teams are structured and demonstrate
the most important practices to use for designing the channels that meet your customers’
specific needs. And if you need outside help, we have provided a list of digital design companies
and their capabilities to help you build a shortlist of vendors to evaluate.
4. Optimize: how to measure and adjust. Completing a set of design improvements is not the
end of the journey. We’ll show you how to establish the right metrics to track success. We’ll also
give you benchmarks that you can use to determine how your efforts measure up. And finally,
we’ll show you how to manage ongoing improvements that will help you develop a more unified
cross-touchpoint experience.

3. For Customer Experience Professionals
Improve Your Digital Customer Experience 3
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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. 76761
Figure 1 The Digital Customer Experience Improvement Playbook
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.76761
Performance
Management
Assessment OrganizationVision
Strategic
Plan
Processes BenchmarksLandscape
Road Map
Tools And
Technology
Continuous
Improvement
Business
Case
DISCOVER PLAN ACT OPTIMIZE
Endnotes
1
Ninety-three percent of respondents to Forrester’s Q4 2011 Global Customer Experience Peer Research
Panel Online Survey said that customer experience is a top strategic priority for their firms. The survey also
revealed that at 77% and 74%, respectively, online and cross-channel customer experiences topped the list
of CX priorities for 2012. Only 29% reported improving the in-store experience as being a priority, while a
mere 22% wanted to improve phone self-service.
2
Please refer back to the online document to see the associated reports in the playbook. See the June 25,
2012, “Executive Overview: The Digital Customer Experience Improvement Playbook” report.