Forrester: Customer Experience in the UK Stagnates With More Brands Becoming Mediocre

LONDON, Jan. 23, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Not a single brand in the UK has managed to rise to the top of Forrester's Customer Experience Index (CX Indextm)  rankings or continued to move upward. Customer experience (CX) quality languished in 2018 as more brands become mediocre.

Forrester's CX Index methodology measures how well a brand's customer experience strengthens the loyalty of its customers. Based on a survey of 9,033 UK adult customers in 2018, Forrester benchmarked CX quality at 36 brands doing business in the UK.

Liverpool Victoria (LV=) confirmed its position as number one in the auto/home insurers category. Nationwide Building Society still topped the banks rankings in 2018 despite seeing its score stagnate, while new entrant Very.co.uk takes over Amazon's position in the digital retailers category. John Lewis continues to be the number one multichannel retailer and while Tesco came out on top among wireless providers.

The percentage of UK brands making it into the good category fell from 31% in 2017 to just 14% in 2018. A staggering 86% now deliver OK experiences, which suggests customers are struggling to tell the difference between the experiences offered by competing brands.

The auto/home insurance and multichannel retailer industries saw their average score rise by a small but statistically significant amount this year. In contrast, the industry average score for banks fell by almost 4 points, with all but one of the seven banks seeing a statistically significant decline to their score. This year, the banks provided an average of seven emotionally positive experiences for each negative experience, down from 11 in 2017.

In fact, Forrester believes that emotion is key to the positive development of a brand. "Brands that want to break away from the pack should focus on emotion: How an experience makes customers feel has a bigger influence on their loyalty to a brand than effectiveness or ease in almost every industry," says Joana van den Brink-Quintanilha.

Even a minor improvement to a brand's customer experience quality can add tens of millions of dollars of revenue by reducing customer churn and increasing share of wallet. What's more, customers with positive emotions are more willing to pay a premium price for the same products and services.

To learn more about how Forrester's CX Index can help your business and register for a demo, please visit https://forr.com/2CvyfZh.

About Forrester's CX Index
Forrester's CX Index is the most complete and powerful CX tool in the market today. The CX Index gives businesses a deep and actionable understanding of the quality of their customers' experiences, competitive benchmark data so that business and technology leaders know how they stack up against their peers, and the ability to model the improvements that will have the biggest impact on revenue.

About Forrester
Forrester (Nasdaq: FORR) is one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world. We work with business and technology leaders to develop customer-obsessed strategies that drive growth. Forrester's unique insights are grounded in annual surveys of more than 675,000 consumers and business leaders worldwide, rigorous and objective methodologies, and the shared wisdom of our most innovative clients. Through proprietary research, data, custom consulting, exclusive executive peer groups, and events, the Forrester experience is about a singular and powerful purpose: to challenge the thinking of our clients to help them lead change in their organizations.

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