I’m happy to share that on November 1, 2022, I joined Forrester’s buyer expertise (CX) staff reporting to Rick Parrish. This group is core to creating Forrester’s buyer expertise service and the CX Chief Success Cycle, which guides how CX leaders enhance efficiency and justify higher funding in buyer expertise.
Now, this doesn’t imply that I’ve forgotten all the things I find out about advertising and marketing organizations, budgets, planning, CMO management, or digital advertising and marketing finest practices. However I did be a part of the CX staff to additional construct Forrester’s curriculum on buyer obsession and to search out one of the best methods to attach the advertising and marketing and CX features.
It’s a good time, I feel, to restate the excellence between buyer obsession and buyer expertise and to touch upon why a distinction exists.
Buyer obsession is an enterprisewide technique that places the shopper on the heart of your management, technique, and operations. Buyer-obsessed organizations maximize the worth that they supply to prospects — for instance, by creating higher merchandise, companies, and experiences. To do that, customer-obsessed companies rethink all enterprise features, resembling merchandise, manufacturing, services, aggressive strategy, upkeep, partnerships, hiring, and coaching (amongst others), in order that they’re customer-led, insights-driven, quick, and linked.
Buyer expertise is prospects’ perceptions of their interactions with a model. It’s one of many key ways in which corporations present worth to prospects. Some corporations have buyer expertise groups that information CX enhancements. The exhausting work of CX groups, nonetheless, is only one piece of the enterprisewide effort essential to attain buyer obsession and the sustainably higher CX — and higher merchandise, companies, and so forth. — that comes with it.
A corporation can have an excellent buyer expertise however not be customer-obsessed … as a result of buyer obsession is about greater than only a buyer’s perceptions of their interactions with a model.
There’s way more to come back on this as I launch my analysis plan with Rick. Inform me how these definitions land for you. What does buyer obsession imply at your agency? Do you name it one thing particular at your organization? What? Who oversees your pivot to buyer obsession? Do you could have a buyer expertise operate? How do you assume buyer obsession and buyer expertise differ and overlap?
