9 Customer Takeaways From Forrester’s 2017 CXNYC Forum

By Margaret Wise, Vice President of Strategy, ARKE

Lessons from Forrester’s 2017 CXNYC Forum

Forrester’s 2017 CXNYC Forum leveraged the firm’s most recent research to help customer experience (CX) professionals plan, design, and manage experiences that create business impact.

Held June 20 and 21 at the New York Hilton Midtown in New York City, it focused on designing breakaway customer experiences. Forrester’s research stresses emotional engagement is the key to “powerful CX.”

But delivering it is challenging. As Forrester noted, “some customers want to feel safe, while others need to feel valued.” To offer the best CX — or, more broadly, brand experiences, you have to know your customers.

In addition to attending the conference, the ARKE team hosted an executive dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Manhattan on Tuesday night.

Key Lessons Learned

1. Relationships matter.
2. It shouldn’t feel like a personalized experience. It should just feel like a great experience.
3. Be innovative to achieve your vision and strategy.
4. Be overt about collecting data. But be covert about using it to create personalized experiences.
5. Create customer dialogues, not monologues.
6. Different is not always better. But better is always different.
7. Every bad customer experience hurts.
8. How many of your meetings this week were about your customer?
9. Today you’re not behind your competition. You’re behind your customer.