REPORT

Customer experience is still very much a work in progress for senior marketers who participated in this study, fielded in late 2008. Despite overwhelming agreement on the importance of customer experience and word-of-mouth, the admit their companies are failing to take decisive, company-wide action to integrate customer voice and experience into key business and marketing processes. Sponsored by Satmetrix, the Net Promoter Company, the study, entitled "Giving Customer Voice More Volume," revealed that a surprising 58 percent of the 480 executives surveyed said their companies do not compensate any employees or executives based on customer loyalty, satisfaction improvements or analytics.

The CMO Council study underscores critical deficiencies in the way companies measure, optimize and leverage customer experience to drive loyalty, improve brand value and increase business performance and growth, including:

• Insufficient availability and aggregation of real-time customer experience data across touch points that should be shared across the organization
• Poor use of customer interactions to collect insights and intelligence or maximize up-sell and advocacy opportunities
• Lack of Internet processes and systems to track online word of mouth and drive customer advocacy
• Intermittent or deficient monitoring of customer experience that fails to provide true and timely insights into problems and opportunities
• Too few compensation programs tied to customer experience, loyalty and satisfaction gains