Here is an interesting take on customer satisfaction from Harley Manning, a vice-president and research director at Forrester Research, who was recently asked this question: ‘When should we put aside the need for profits and fund customer experience projects instead?’
“His question surprised me. And I clearly surprised him when I responded, ‘Never.’ I let that hang in the air for a moment so it could sink in. Then I added, ‘You should never put aside the need for profits when you fund customer experience projects.’ I could see that people were a little confused so I went on. ‘You should only fund customer experience projects that will produce profits. That’s why you do those projects in the first place. And if you have other kinds of projects that will produce better business results, do them instead. But if you take the time to create the business models for your CX projects you’ll probably find that they’ll produce better ROI than most of the initiatives they’re competing against.'”
“To be clear, the guy who had asked the question seemed very bright, and had a lot of expertise in his area (metrics and measurement). But he had fallen into the same trap that so many customer experience advocates fall into. He wasn’t thinking of improving customer experience as a path to achieving business results. Instead he was thinking of it just as a generally good thing to do for customers (which it is, but that’s not why you should do it).”
Click the image to read more observations from Manning.
