Customer experience with brands ranked 'OK' across key industries, with less than 1% ranked excellent
Although customer experience (CX) remains a key focus for global brands, researchers from Forrester say that brands have a long road ahead with just 0.5% of global brands predicted to achieve customer 'excellence' over the next two years.
Forrester found that a majority of industries surveyed ranked in the ‘OK’ CX range only.
In a newly-released report entitled Global Customer Experience Trends 2017 which focuses on retail, insurance and banking, Forrester analyst Rick Parrish and team found that only 18% of US brands were noted for providing good or excellent CX. A mere one percent of the brands in the 2016 US CX index achieved a score in the excellent category. There were no European brands who were ranked as excellent in CX.
Interestingly, digital retail appears to have an emotional advantage with 57% of customers citing emotionally positive experiences with digital retailers compared to 50% who had emotionally positive experiences with traditional retailers.
“Traditional retail should be able to provide better customer experiences on average than digital retail, especially due to traditional brands having strong CX momentum,” Parrish notes in the research.
The report also looked at the quality of the retail banking experience which edged up in part because of the middle of the pack brands that made modest score improvements. In 2016, 26% of top retail banks were most likely to be placed among the ‘excellent’ brands.
The retail bank numbers “are even more impressive considering that banks only make up about ten percent of the total number of brands we studied,” notes Parrish.
“While CX leaders in banking will stall at the top, while middle-tier and lagging brands will slowly improve, look for disruption in the insurance industries with larger brands – particularly in the UK and US – trying to differentiate themselves by acquiring small players that specialize in different segments, such as car and home insurance.”
The study notes that the insurance industry is ripe for disruption. In mature insurance markets like the US and UK where commoditization has taken hold, larger brands will try to buy differentiation by acquiring sets of small players that specialize in different segments.
In immature insurance markets like China and India, on the other hand, CX scores will lag while insurers discover how to attract underinsured customers.
"A huge 91% of insurance brands didn’t move at all between 2015 and 2016 but the insurance industry did see their emotional performance improve slightly with 57% seeing a higher than average increase. The UK saw the greatest increase in emotionally positive experiences with an 8% jump," Parrish reports.