Parting Lessons From CX Summit North America To Help You Deliver The Total Experience

We’ve just wrapped up another successful CX Summit North America. As I leave Nashville, I feel energized, inspired, and more optimistic than ever about the future of experiences. Attending the sessions, hearing from our guest speakers and award winners, and most of all, talking one on one with so many of you and seeing your passion and dedication gives me great confidence and hope. Thank you!

This year’s Summit was also memorable in that we unveiled Forrester’s new Total Experience Score, based on our (also) new Brand Experience Index (BX Index™) and long-standing Customer Experience Index (CX Index™). The Total Experience Score is the first to enable companies to quantify the combined effects of brand and customer experience, which, as Dipanjan Chatterjee eloquently explained in his Tuesday keynote, is vastly more powerful than the impact of one of those alone. Because the Total Experience Score measures perceptions throughout the customer lifecycle, it can help companies pinpoint areas for improvement. This is good for companies, and it’s good for customers.

The timing for a total-experience focus couldn’t be better, as experience is in urgent need of an overhaul. Our latest CX Index scores found that CX in the US fell for the fourth consecutive year and now sits at a new all-time low. Though the technology and tools to deliver stellar experiences exist, misalignment between CX, marketing, and digital strategies and teams too often prevents that from happening. The sessions and workshops at CX Summit gave attendees strategies and actionable advice to bridge these gaps.

Now Is The Time To Act

This year’s CX Summit offered many takeaways for teams to start delivering a compelling total experience. To recap just a few:

Building the total experience starts with an experience mindset. As AI and other new technologies progress, customers expect increasingly seamless and intuitive digital experiences. Brands must evolve their experiences to be ever more assistive, anticipatory, and empowering, particularly as consumers are more distracted than ever before. In their keynote sessions, Kelsey Chickering and AJ Joplin shared what it takes to build an experience mindset and design great total experiences now and in the future.
Equipping your people is an ongoing endeavor. Effective use of AI and other cutting-edge tools takes perseverance and prioritization. Summit attendees learned the importance of cultivating employees’ artificial intelligence quotient (AIQ) to drive better results and how to prioritize use cases for new technology and tools. We were also reminded that sound fundamentals, such as building journey maps with clearly defined goals, are still critically important.
Leadership must show the way forward. To build an effective CX function, CX leaders need to model customer obsession and instill it in their teams. This can be especially challenging at a time when leaders are also navigating intense change and economic volatility. Our track dedicated to leadership and culture provided advice to help leaders stay focused on their mission. It also explored how leaders can foster an effective employee experience that connects to CX strategy.
Measurement needs to be meaningful. Many CX and marketing professionals struggle with knowing what to measure and how best to measure it. We dove into those challenges head on with sessions focused on choosing the right metrics, using CX measurement to enhance organizational performance, and sourcing data for effective marketing measurement.
Customer obsession is (still) hard — but it’s critical. This year’s CX Index results underscored that a gap still exists between executives’ perception of the CX they deliver and how customers perceive their experiences. Customer obsession is hard, but as Shar VanBoskirk reminded us in her keynote yesterday, difficulty is irrelevant. Customer obsession wins and retains business — and this year’s Customer Obsession Awards winners reminded us that it’s achievable.

CX Summit gave us much to reflect on and reminded us that there is much work left to do. Attendees now have strategies and tools to help them build a game plan to start delivering on the total experience. (Attendees also have one year of digital access to CX Summit content. And if you’re a Forrester Decisions client, you can schedule guidance sessions with the very same analysts you heard from this week.)

I’m already looking forward to seeing you again next year and hearing about your progress!