The combination of growing consumer expectations, rising churn rates, and more options with lower barriers to switch is placing a company’s customer experience (CX) center stage. CX leaders grow revenue faster than CX laggards, drive higher brand preference, and can charge more for their products.
But according to Forrester‘s U.S. 2017 Customer Experience Index, CX quality worsened between 2016 and 2017—twice as many brand scores fell as rose, and losses were bigger than gains.
Based on a survey of nearly 120,000 U.S. online adult consumers, Forrester’s CX Index measures and ranks more than 300 U.S. brands across 21 industries to identify how well a brand’s customer experience strengthens the loyalty of its customers. Key findings include that not a single industry average improved this year and that emotion continues to have a bigger influence on customer loyalty than effectiveness or ease in nearly every industry.
“If brands want to break away from the pack and become CX leaders, they must focus on emotion,” said Cliff Condon, chief research and product officer at Forrester, in a news release. “Best-in-class brands average 17 emotionally positive experiences for every negative experience, while the lowest-performing brands provided only two emotionally positive experiences for each negative one.
“Emotion is critical to a brand’s bottom line,” Condon added. “For example, the TV service provider industry had the largest percentage of customers who felt annoyed of any industry in the study. Among those annoyed customers, only 17 percent plan to stay with the brand, 12 percent plan to increase their spending, and 11 percent will advocate for the brand. A large TV service provider leaves $104 million on the table for every one-point decline in its CX Index score.”
Top 15 best-in-class companies for customer experience
Forrester’s CX Index reveals the companies that are recognized as best-in-class—firms that are in the top 5 percent of CX quality across industries in their regions. USAA topped the 2017 best-in-class list this year, with the following companies in the top 15 (in alphabetical order):
- BB&T
- Cricket Wireless
- Edward Jones
- Etsy
- The Hartford
- Homewood Suites by Hilton
- Lexus
- MetroPCS Communications
- Navy Federal Credit Union
- Omni Hotels & Resorts
- QVC
- Regions Bank
- The Vanguard Group
- Zappos.com
