Research and advisory firm Forrester and Verint Systems announced a partnership designed to provide a holistic approach to customer experience (CX) measurement and management.
The partnership combines Forrester’s Customer Experience Index methodology, benchmark data and engagement program with Verint Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) to create a single source for organizations to collect, analyse and act on benchmark data.
“This partnership will have a significant influence on the future of customer experience because it breaks down the barriers that have always existed between technology and insight for industry-wide context,” says Roxana Strohmenger, vice-president: customer experience index at Forrester.
“Organisations have previously focused on CX as a business imperative with technology as an optional layer to help surface actionable intelligence, but those efforts lacked awareness of how the business stacked up within its own industry.
“Together, Verint and Forrester are combining insights and data that better gauge customer experience quality, the competitive landscape and what to improve in an organisation’s CX program to drive incremental revenue.”
Forrester’s CX Index platform gives businesses a deep and actionable understanding of the quality of their customers’ experiences, competitive benchmark data and the ability to model which CX improvements will have the biggest impact on revenue.
Verint’s robust EFM platform helps empower CX teams to listen, analyze and act on structured and unstructured customer feedback captured through targeted and personalized surveys.
Through the partnership, organisations will have access to an integrated approach to CX management with the ability to more deeply understand the quality of their customer experience as compared to industry peers, and to take action to advance processes and service quality to enhance their positions.
Forrester’s CX Index is an established benchmark that measures customer experience quality and its effect on loyalty in three key areas:
* Effectiveness – The experience delivers value to customers.
* Ease – It’s easy for customers to get value from the experience.
* Emotion – Customers feel good about their experience.
CX Index covers 17 separate industries (travel, financial services, retail, technology/telecom and others) in eight global markets, including the US, Canada, U.K., France, Germany, India, China and Australia.
Verint is an industry-leading provider of customer engagement and experience solutions and will embed Forrester’s CX Index platform into its Enterprise Feedback Management deployments. With this new capability, customers can deploy Forrester-developed scoring surveys to gauge their specific CX Index score.
Data from the customer-specific surveys will be analysed by Forrester, and scoring survey results will be displayed within the Verint EFM solution. This is part of an overall “Engagement Program” that will provide a customized evaluation to the customer that illustrates how its scores compare to the industry norm and key competitors – using a custom integration that Verint is building to the Forrester CX Index platform, which will also include recommendations for CX improvements.
“This exclusive partnership between Verint and Forrester is an industry first because it embeds the CX Index within our Enterprise Feedback Management solution, providing customers with best-of-breed technology and one of the most comprehensive CX benchmarks,” says Ben Smith, GM: customer experience solutions, Verint. “This combination will not only help organizations measure themselves against industry peers and CX leaders from outside their industry, but also allow them to dig into improvement areas and measure the revenue impact of CX improvements – all through a single solution.”
