Innovation consultant Adam Richardson posted the first of a series of blogs regarding customer experience a few days ago.  All companies who have customers have a customer experience, but Richardson believes that until recently it has been a relatively untapped opportunity for differentiation and excellence.  To optimize your customer experience he notes that you must have a deep understanding of:

• Customer Journey-from informing your customers of your service to actually serving them, what does the journey that you take your customers on look like?
• Touchpoints-what are the company-managed channels that your customers interact with—ads, call centers, Web sites, etc.?
• Ecosystems-how can you develop integrated ecosystems to create new customer journeys and experiences?

MREB view: Clearly, Research has a big role to play in understanding and optimizing customer experience, and many organizations don’t even realize the amount of existing data that they have to inform these strategic decisions.  And that’s where customer experience analysis can actually help Research (in addition to Research informing it)—use your understanding of your customer touchpoints to organize and synthesize disparate data streams.

We all know how hard it is to cull all of the existing information at your organization and marry it to data assets owned by Research, but having all of this information together can provide a wealth of new insights.  Use your customer pathway to organize the data from across the company; it’s amazing what new insights emerge when you synthesize just the information that you already have.  MREB members, see how FedEx connected more than 200 operational data assets with the Research-owned customer survey programs to improve access to data and the actionability of resulting insights.