EXPERIENCE STRATEGY:

CONNECTING
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
TO BUSINESS STRATEGY

By Charlene Li with Aubrey Littleton and Omar Akhtar

Altimeter, a Prophet Company
July 2017
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Our research found that most people define their ideal experience in terms of
speed and relevance — getting fast responses to their questions and finding
the information they need quickly. Yet despite customer experience being a top
priority for the C-suite, few organizations have a coherent strategy that aligns
customer experience with business strategy and then across departments.
Our research found that the key is to use relationships as the foundation for a
next-generation customer experience strategy, with touchpoints and journeys
remaining practical necessities. The strategy must prioritize experiences that
create relevance in the relationship that in the end drives business results.
To develop the strategy itself, start by understanding the maturity of your
experience strategy formulation and execution capabilities. From there, the
strategy process has four components:
• Understand the next generation customer on a continuous basis.
• Create a vision and guiding principles that connect experience to relationships.
• Prioritize experience initiatives for relevance.
• Align the organization for execution.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Executive Summary 2
Despire Making Customer Experience a Priority, Companies Don’t Know How to Invest in It 3
The Next-Generation Experience Strategy is Based on Relationships 6
The Experience Strategy Maturity Model 10
Four Steps to Create Your Experience Strategy 16
Case Study: Piedmont Health 19
Case Study: Manulife Bank 21
Case Study: Eli Lilly 23
Endnotes 24
Methodology 24
About Us 25
How to Work With Us 25

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

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DESPITE MAKING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
A PRIORITY, COMPANIES DON’T KNOW
HOW TO INVEST IN IT
Customer experience is the latest buzzword hitting organizations — almost every company
will profess to being “customer-focused,” “customer-obsessed,” or “customer-centric.” Prior
research found that 89% of companies1 expect to compete mostly on the basis of customer
experience and that by the year 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product2 as
the key brand differentiator. To that end, the biggest question facing business leaders is this:

Where should we invest to create

the best possible customer experience?

A CEO can’t answer this question if they view experience through the lens of touchpoints or
even journeys, especially if the goal is to deliver an experience that is relevant to each person.
Touchpoints live in many different parts of the organization — the call center, the website, physical
store, product design, advertising, etc. Each siloed department interacts with customers in a
different part of the customer lifecycle and has tools, data, and touchpoints optimized for that
particular journey. Customer experience is more than just touchpoints that rollup into journeys —
it’s the series of experiences over time that define the overall relationship with an organization
and brand.

Moreover, viewing experience only through the lens of customers ignores other key
relationships — those between organizations and employees, investors, suppliers, partners,
regulators, competitors, and volunteers (for non-profits and religious organizations), etc. All
of these relationships deserve having an experience designed for them, hence the need for a
comprehensive experience strategy that drives holistic business results.

When it Comes to Experience, Customers Want Relevance, Not Delight

But what about “delighting customers?” In our research, we looked for examples of strategies
that create experiences that bring joy, happiness, and delight to customers. One interviewee
described an experience when trying to rent a car and the person at the rental counter insisted
providing a “delightful” experience that involved 1) asking about their day, 2) explaining the
contract options in detail, and 3) giving a personalized tour of the car’s features. They were trying
to bring “joy and delight” to the experience, but that’s NOT what the customer wanted, which
was to just get to their car quickly, which was parked just outside the door.

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

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FIGURE 1 Altimeter conducted
FAST RESPONSES AND RELEVANT INFORMATION FORM THE a consumer study of
TABLE STAKES OF EXPERIENCES 1,412 people across five
countries to understand
Thinking of your ideal customer experience, how they think about
which of the following are most important to you? their ideal customer
Please select up to three. experience (see Figure
1). Globally, the answers
Table Stakes
“Fast responses
to questions or
Fast responses
to questions or 52% complaints” and “Can
complaints find the information

49%
Can find the I need quickly”
information I need were clearly the top
quickly
responses. These two

36%
Complete top responses represent
transactions quickly what we consider “table
stakes” priorities. In
The experience is
always consistent 30% the US, however, the
answer “Complete
transactions quickly”
Personalized
experience 19% ranked the highest
but was a distant third
based on my data
in other geographies.
Remembers me
between and during 17% And respondents from
visits Japan were almost
10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%
twice as likely as
other geographies to
Base: 1,412 respondents
Source: Altimeter Q2 2017 Experience Study. Additional geographic, gender, and age
include “Personalized
breakouts available online*. experience based on my
data” in their top three
choices.

We also found that women were much more likely than men to want to find information
quickly, as were 18-24 year olds. Adults age 65+ were more much more likely to want to
complete transactions quickly. More details around geographic, gender, and age breakouts
are available online*.

We also asked consumers what they think prevents companies from providing the ideal
customer experience (see Figure 2). “Lack of employee training” received the top votes across
the board, followed closely by “They value profit over customers.” Underlying these responses
is a deep-seated belief that companies do not value the experience of a customer as much as
their money. Interestingly, across the board, people didn’t think this was a technology problem,
but rather one related to priorities and people.

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

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People in Japan focused on completely different reasons for this breakdown, with the top
response being that departments don’t work well with each other. And Japanese were twice as
likely to believe that companies don’t understand what consumers need than respondents from
other countries. Women and adults 65+ were slightly more likely to believe that poor employee
training results in poor customer experiences, while young adults age 18-34 were more likely to
believe that companies didn’t invest enough in technology. More details around geographic,
gender, and age breakouts are available online*.

In the end, you can only satisfy people if you deliver what it is that they want, at the time
they want it, understanding what is relevant to them at that particular time and place. The
information, response, or transaction delivered to them “quickly” needs to be tuned to what
they define as relevant. People experience joy, happiness, and delight from things that matter
to them — there is a sense that the organization had mindreading skills and could anticipate
the next action that would help them quickly accomplish their goal.

FIGURE 2
POORLY TRAINED EMPLOYEES AND MISPLACED PRIORITIES PREVENT COMPANIES
FROM PROVIDING IDEAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES

What do you think prevents companies from providing

the ideal customer experience? Please select up to three.

Lack of good
employee training 45%
44%
They value profit over
customers

35%
Departments don’t work well
with each other

They don’t care about

customer satisfaction 32%
23%
They don’t understand what I
need

15%
They don’t invest enough in
technology

10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%

Base: 1,412 respondents
Source: Altimeter Q2 2017 Experience Study. Additional geographic, gender, and age
breakouts available online*.

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

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THE NEXT-GENERATION EXPERIENCE
STRATEGY IS BASED ON RELATIONSHIPS
Experience is thus not about unicorns, rainbows, or soft fuzzy ideas. Instead it is about a
shared value proposition with customers that aligns to your business. The strategy that
creates these experiences needs to be intentional about the value it wants to deliver.

Our research found that the only way to link experience strategy to brand strategy, and
ultimately to business strategy, is to look at it through the lens of a relationship. Thus, our
definition of experience strategy follows:

Experience strategy is a set of prioritized and

coordinated moves that use experiences to build relationships
that result in brand and business outcomes.

Experience is the mechanism through which your business strategy and brand value
proposition are activated with customers. When customer experience strategy focuses on
and is measured by the strength and nature of the customer relationship, it can then be tied
to business strategy and brand strategy (see Figure 3).

FIGURE 3
RELATIONSHIPS CONNECT EXPERIENCE, BRAND, AND BUSINESS STRATEGIES

Experience Metrics
• Speed to completion
• Drop off at key touchpoints
• Effort scores
Experience
Strategy Relationship Metrics
• Customer satisfaction
• Lifetime value
• Net Promoter Score

Relationships

Business Brand
Business Metrics Strategy Strategy Brand Metrics
• Revenues/Profits • Relevance
• Market share • Awareness
• Share of wallet
www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]
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Relationships become the common thread connecting experience, brand, and business
strategies, allowing an organization to prioritize the experiences that will drive value in the
relationships and make hard trade-offs in investments and resources. If experience is all
about relationships, then measuring the impact of experience should be closely tied to how
organizations understand and measure relationships.

This is the problem: Organizations are notoriously bad at understanding and measuring the
depth and health of relationships. It’s so much easier to count things – sales, completed
journeys, social media followers, etc. One organization we know obsessively tracked net
satisfaction score (NSS) on call center transactions but did not equate them to their Net
Promoter Score (NPS) and ended up overinvesting in NSS to the detriment of actual customer
brand loyalty. If you measure and value these things, then you are back to optimizing
touchpoints and journeys, not relationships.

It’s thus important to understand not just when people want to be engaged, but also when
they need and want to be left alone. In good relationships, there is a level of confidence,
exemplified by the ability to sit comfortably in silence with each other. The depth of the
relationship is revealed and heightened by the whitespace that surrounds it. For example, I
typically visit my local grocery store once a week, and if I get a marketing message right after
I’ve shopped there, I’m annoyed. If, instead, they know to leave me alone until the day before
my next trip, the interaction is highly relevant and I’m happy to hear from them.

What’s New About Next-Generation Experience Strategy

A next-generation experience strategy isn’t about using the latest whiz-bang technologies
to create “delightful” experiences. Instead, it harnesses the power of data and analytics to
understand individuals at scale and develops relationships in a rapidly changing context,
preparing the organization to serve the next generation of customers. This differs from how
experience strategy was designed, even a few years ago, in that a more agile, iterative, and
prototype-first mindset is needed (see Figure 4):

“When you think about next-generation strategy development,

you have to think about the next generation of customers
and the different ways they want to engage.”
— Ron Myers, Vice President, Corporate Marketing, AMD

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

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FIGURE 4
HOW EXPERIENCE STRATEGY IS DIFFERENT TODAY

TRADITIONAL NEXT GENERATION

EXPERIENCE STRATEGY EXPERIENCE STRATEGY
• Solves a need • Builds relationship value
• Survey & heuristic based • Behavioral data based
• Personas & segments • Personalized & intimate
• Linear • Unpredictable
• Optimization focused • Relationship focused
• Functional & utilitarian • Relevant & emotional
• Episodically designed • Continuously designed
• Static • Dynamic, real-time

There are three drivers of this shift in experience strategy:

• The speed and scale of data available continues to increase exponentially. We now
have near real-time actual behavioral data to inform the experience strategy process —
versus survey or heuristic approaches. Rather than sample, we can observe actual behavior
at scale, thanks to cookie tracking and Data Management Platforms (DMPs) that aggregate
your own data along with third-party data. While personas are helpful in creating broad
generalizations of a particular customer’s needs and expectations for design purposes,
experiences can now be designed and delivered on a personalized basis in context of a
situation in real-time.

• People want relevance. Customer experience efforts traditionally focused on

understanding how customers complete a specific purchase journey — all in the context
of the company’s products or services. But with deep and wide data now available, we
can understand how our company fits into their lives versus how customers fit into the
touchpoints and journeys of companies. To be relevant, organizations should see people in
the context of their lives, rather than through the lens of being a customer, client, patient,
or account holder.

• Anticipating changing expectations. People’s expectations are being set today with
every great experience that they have, from ending an Uber ride without having to take
out your wallet to GE’s aviation engine monitoring apps. People bring these experiences
and expectations into other interactions in their lives and, inevitably, the speed of their
changing expectations will outstrip your organization’s ability to anticipate and meet them.
This means that experience strategy will need to be robust and resilient enough to flex with
changing expectations.

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

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Here’s a case study that highlights a data-based experience strategy that delivers relevant
experiences and is equipped to manage changing expectations. The University of Texas Austin
revamped its online learning platform (starting with its online pre-med biomedical sciences
program) and optimized for tablet access. The platform adapted content to each student
based on their pace of learning, where trigger data demonstrated student success or failure
and allowed faculty to course correct in real-time and provide more personalized instruction.

Phil Kormarny, Chief Digital Officer of UT’s Institute of Transformational Learning, observed,
“The data allowed everyone to collaborate in real time rather than wait until the end of
the term. Our relationship with students is now completely different.” The results speak for
themselves — course completion rose from 24% to 86%. But UT is looking to the future as well,
with Version 2.0 of the system featuring a blockchain-enabled student “ledger” that stores
their credits and credentials from schools across the UT system. Each block of data added to
their ledger allows the learning experience to be tailored specifically to that student.

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

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THE EXPERIENCE STRATEGY
MATURITY MODEL
As we conducted our research, we found organizations at various stages of maturity in
their ability to create and execute a next-generation experience strategy. It’s helpful to
understand what a highly mature strategy looks like — here are a few examples:

• Facebook looks 10 years into the future. Mark Zuckerberg lays out his vision of how
the world will change over the next 10 years — and how Facebook’s strategy and the
experiences it will create will evolve to meet the changing needs of people.3

• Amazon creates a culture of customer obsession. Amazon has 16 “leadership

principles,” and number 1 on the list is customer obsession.4 CEO Jeff Bezos makes it
very clear that customers are the lifeblood of the company, writing in his first shareholder
letter in 1997, “From the beginning, our focus has been on offering our customers
compelling value.” Every year since, Bezos includes that first letter, referencing the
strategic and organizational focus on customers.

• Apple centers its strategy on customer benefits. Steve Jobs is famous for saying,
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know
what they want until you show them.” But this is not to say that Jobs and Apple didn’t
care about customers. In fact, Jobs also said, “You’ve got to start with the customer
experience and work backwards to the technology… As we have tried to come up with
a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with ‘What incredible benefits can we give to
the customer? Where can we take the customer?’” Apple looked beyond the customers
of today, tapped world-class designers, and created products and retail experiences that
redefined their categories.

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

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Experience Strategy Maturity Model Elements
Few organizations are at the most mature levels of experience strategy, so the goal is not
only to continually strive to improve your capabilities, it’s also knowing how to best leverage
the capabilities that you currently have. That’s why an analysis of each individual element of
an experience strategy — and how mature you are within each element — is a key starting
point for your strategy.

This maturity model consists of three major sections, focused on 1) Strategy and vision, 2)
Organizational readiness, and 3) Leadership and alignment elements, with four levels of
maturity for each element (see Figure 5).

FIGURE 5
THE EXPERIENCE STRATEGY MATURITY MODEL

Strategy & Vision Elements

ELEMENT LEARNING COMMITTING ACCELERATING EMBEDDING

Focus Optimize specific Create and Build Invest in

touchpoints and optimize experiences experiences
address customer journeys that that create for future
service pain meet customer and deepen relationships.
points. objectives. relationships.

Use of Guidelines define Vision of Vision of scaling Vision is not

vision and customer service being relevant relevance in only frequently
principles standards and to different context of articulated, but is
to guide objectives. segments of individuals. continually used
strategy customers. to drive decisions
choices and actions.

Measurement Touchpoint-level Journey-level Relationship- Experience

metrics. metrics. based metrics. metrics are
business metrics.

Alignment with Experiences Experiences Experiences Experience,

brand strategy tangentially ladder up to support both brand, and
and business tied to brand brand strategy. brand and business
strategy and business business strategies fully
strategy. strategies. integrated.

Investment Payoff is Investment pays Investments see Investments

timeframe immediate off within a year. returns over 1–2 tied to long-
with improved years. term brand and
customer business ROI
satisfaction. calculations.

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

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Organizational Readiness Elements
ELEMENT LEARNING COMMITTING ACCELERATING EMBEDDING

Understanding Customer data Understands Organization- Vision is not

customer collected and customers from wide alignment only frequently
needs/ analyzed at the perspective on customer articulated, but is
analyzing the touchpoint of a single needs being continually used
data level, focused on department. addressed, to drive decisions
how customers based on and actions.
engaged with an relationships
object or process. desired.

Personalization Uses static Delivers some Personalization Uses artificial

capability account-level content and based on real- intelligence to
data (name, past experiences time behavioral identify new ways
orders). based on basic data. to personalize for
behavior (visited relevance.
the site, have
something in the
cart).

Employee A few specialists Departments Everyone trained Training creates

training & understand trained on CX. on CX with confidence to let
engagement and design widespread employees test
experiences. participation. ideas & make
mistakes to learn
what works.

Governance Ad hoc shifting Experience Agile, real-time Transparent

of governance working groups/ assessment of policies and
focus from steering CX performance processes make
process to committees guides decision it possible
customer. provide best making. to change
practices and governance as
guidelines. needed, in real
time.

Technology Point solutions Some customer Strong integration Seamless

integration used, with data warehouse of customer integration
minimal and engagement data and across all
integration to integration engagements platforms and
customer data. to support across multiple throughout the
experience platforms, but organization.
strategy. not across all
departments.

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 Leadership & Alignment Elements

ELEMENT LEARNING COMMITTING ACCELERATING EMBEDDING

Cross- A few people in Driven primarily Several Experience

department one department by the leader of departments work strategy is an
involvement are tasked one department. together to span integral part of
with improving silos. every business
customer discussion, with
service. cross-function
teaming.

Executive Top executives One member Several members CEO and

engagment provide support of the C-suite of the C-suite Board spend
from the actively have experience significant time
sidelines, not participates in strategy as a on experience
actively engaged creating the key strategic strategy.
in the strategy experience initiative.
itself. strategy.

Agility Experience Experience Experience Experience

mindset strategy process strategy is strategy is strategy
is a significant regularly iterative, driven development is
project, reviewed, by feedback constant, with
undertaken as typically rather than the transparency
a major project annually. calendar. creating
every few years. alignment across
the organization.

LEVEL

1 LEARNING
The leaders of these organizations know that experience is critical, but they haven’t
developed a comprehensive strategy. The hallmark of this level is a disjointed approach
— while there are likely a series of “one-off” fixes in specific areas or even a few ideas driving
larger changes, there is no overarching, articulated strategy. Most importantly, no one
executive or department owns the responsibility for experience, and there is no agreement
on what metrics to use. Despite this, organizations can still maximize the experience at this
level, given the current maturity level, while also preparing to move to Level Two in the
following ways:

• Assign an individual or team that will own and drive an experience strategy.
• Define the outcomes of an experience strategy in terms of relationships metrics.
• Identify and engage experience champions informally throughout the organization.
• Prioritize initiatives that will bring greater understanding of customers to the most
relevant people in the organization.
• Resist the urge to “buy” a technology solution to solve a strategy problem.

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

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LEVEL

2 COMMITTING
At this level, there is a better articulation of the strategic goals around experience and
there’s a desire to be more detailed in the experience strategy itself, especially around
being more disciplined about prioritizing the many initiatives on the table. Organizations at
this level are characterized by multiple experience efforts, often times competing for people,
resources, and even customer engagement. So while there’s agreement on the objective and
end goal, there isn’t clarity on how exactly we get there. Organizations at this level should
consider the following:

• Develop a common view of experience gaps that creates alignment and prioritization of
initiatives.
• Cultivate cross-departmental alignment and trust to support the inevitable trade-offs that
will have to be made.
• Create a comprehensive set of key performance indicators focused on relationships, with
incentives tied to improvements.
• Address executive and employee development needs to foster experience mindsets
while weeding out experience naysayers.
• Invest sparingly in technology, and only if it fills multiple experience gaps.

LEVEL

3 ACCELERATING
These organizations have not only internal alignment on an experience strategy, but
also have the results that prove that experience leads to business results. There are clear
goals, accountability, and employees have multiple successes and proof points that give
them confidence to pull through tough barriers or failures. To be clear, there are still gaps
in the experience, but the organization is confident that it has the strategy, leadership, and
capabilities to address them as they arise. Organizations at this stage need to:

• Push the experience mindset to all executives and employees, even if they never come in
contact with customers.
• Create greater agility in creating the experience strategy with a “test and learn”
approach that is data-driven and action-biased.
• Develop the experience strategy in line with brand and business strategies.
• Connect experience metrics tightly to business and brand metrics.
• Invest in data and systems that enable real-time, behaviorally-driven personalization.
• Replace legacy systems with platforms that provide the power and flexibility to meet
constantly changing technology needs.

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

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LEVEL

4 EMBEDDING
For these organizations, experience is a way of life with a strong understanding of
customers — not just the ones they have now, but also the ones they hope to acquire.
They use those insights to build new, relevant experiences for customers before they even
know they need them. And, most importantly, they recognize that the experience as a
relationship is a journey, not a destination, with no clear end. For these organizations, the
experience strategy is synonymous with the business and brand strategies — there is no
delineation of where one begins and the other ends. Even at this level, challenges remain,
namely to:

• Repeat constantly the importance of experience, not only by executives but also echoed
by every employee and felt by all partners, vendors, investors, etc.
• Remain convinced that there is always something the organization can do better to
deliver a great experience, because customers constantly evolve.
• Extend the strategy to include other organizations in the ecosystem to improve the
experience when passing between companies.
• Encourage all employees to take on the mantle and responsibility to deliver a great
experience.
• Invest strategically in technology platforms that provide insights to the front lines of the
organization so that they can take action in near real-time.

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FOUR STEPS TO CREATE YOUR
EXPERIENCE STRATEGY
On the surface, the four steps to creating an experience strategy look familiar (see Figure 6).
But creating a next-generation experience strategy that focuses on relationships requires
taking a different approach to each of these four steps, which depends heavily on where you
are in your experience strategy maturity and the resources you have available.

FIGURE 6
BUILD A NEXT GENERATION EXPERIENCE STRATEGY WITH FOUR KEY STEPS

step
step
4
step
3 Align Your
step
2 Prioritize Organization
1 Set Initiatives
Understand Guiding
Next Gen Principles
Customers

1 Understand the Next Generation Customer on a Continuous Basis

The first component of the customer experience strategy is to understand your customers’
objectives, continuously, and at a granular level. The key here is to understand what those
objectives are today — and also how they will change and evolve in the future. Your customers
never stand still and neither should your understanding of their objectives and journeys.

Traditionally, customer research and journey mapping has been difficult and tedious, so we
tended to do it sporadically and only for a few personas that represented different types of
customers. But with plentiful data available, we can take a different approach, one that not only
taps real-time data to understand the context of a customer experience, but also understands it
at far greater granularity, down even to the individual level. Today’s CRM platforms are evolving
into next generation platforms that can integrate these disparate data sources and uncover
trends with artificial intelligence.

Because of this, customer research must now:

• Be based on actual behavior rather than inferred. Surveys, interviews, ethnographic studies,
etc., all play an important part in understanding the decision-making process and in mapping
customer journeys. But observing behavior, especially online, provides even more insights.

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 Companies like Nielsen, ComScore, and Hitwise provide deep behavioral data on your
customers. Jumpshot, a start-up audience analytics company, tracks what people do not only
on your site, but also the 99% of the time they spend elsewhere on the Internet. With panel
data going back years, they can also analyze how journeys have changed over time and what
influences played a role in that change.

• Pull together the “voice of the customer” across departmental silos. Tracking and
measuring customer experience has historically been piecemeal — a survey here, a social
listening post there — and very quickly you are drowning in data with little meaning. For
example, Argos, a multi-channel retailer with 740 stores in the United Kingdom, used ForeSee
to monitor, aggregate, and measure voice of customer across 14 channels. With one place to
understand what is and isn’t working, team members ranging from store operations to digital
work together to improve the customer experience.

• Uncover underlying beliefs to transform relationships. Understanding the narrative — the

underlying beliefs — that drives behaviors and decisions allows organization to identify gaps,
creating the opportunity to better align with those beliefs. For example, patients used to
be incredibly loyal to their physicians. But there is an emerging narrative with some patient
groups where convenience and availability of care is more important than seeing the same
doctor. Understanding how the narrative around doctor-patient relationship is changing is
crucial if you want to build a robust strategy for your next-generation customer. Narrative
analytics vendor Protagonist uses machine learning to help digest huge amounts of user-
generated content (blogs, posts, comments, tweets, etc.) to distill common relationships and
identify the underlying narratives. While humans do the actual narrative analysis, machine
learning takes that analysis and helps identify when similar narratives are being used.

If you have few resources or expertise, your priority should be to get the “voice of the next-
generation customer” as high as possible into the organization. One way to do this is to establish
a “customer advisory board” made up of not your best and biggest customers, but your most
demanding and forward-thinking ones. Exposing executives to emerging customer needs in a
tangible, emotional way is crucial for future investments and resources.

2 Create a Vision and Guiding Principles That Connect Experience to Relationships

A key part of the strategy is a vision and set of principles that can serve as a guide for making
strategic trade-offs. For example, do you invest in call center training or develop a mobile app?
Without those guiding principles, decisions are made based on which department advocates the
most for investment in their particular touchpoint.

When you define and measure customer experience on how it adds or detracts to the overall
relationship, it provides a connection (albeit, sometimes indirect) to business results. Here’s an
example: Optimizing a call center interaction to 1) minimize wait time, 2) minimize total time on
the call, or 3) maximize customer satisfaction will create three different sets of outcomes and
decisions on investments, respectively 1) hire more people to reduce wait times, 2) invest in
training or technology to reduce call time, or 3) empower call center staff to do whatever it takes
to make customers happy.

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

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One interviewee shared:

“You can go out of business creating great experiences

for your customer if they don’t align with
your core value proposition.”
— Christine Hill, Global Customer Experience Strategy and Measurement Leader, Eli Lilly

If instead you create a vision that incorporates the lifetime value of the customer, customer
satisfaction, or Net Promoter Score (NPS) — which all reflect the value of the relationship —
you get a different perspective that reflects how experiences add up over time to impact the
customer relationship. This alignment forces you to look at the data across the entire customer
experience, across journeys, and over time.

More advanced organizations are already looking beyond NPS, which only looks at intent to
recommend the company’s products or services. With social listening skills, you can graduate from
the intent and track if that person has actually recommended, to whom, and whether it resulted in
a sale or other type of engagement. Link all of this back to your experience initiatives, and you have
the beginnings of a measurement system that ties touchpoints all the way to business results.

To get started crafting your experience vision and guiding principles, take your understanding
of the next-generation customer and brainstorm how they would describe their relationship with
your organization in the future. Capture how you are relevant in their lives and be sure to use
emotions to describe how the relationship makes them feel. The process of creating the vision
and principles creates alignment, especially at the leadership level.

The Power of Guiding Principles: Philips Healthcare Case Study

While a vision sets key objectives, guiding principles provide the foundation for making trade-
offs. For example, as part of its digital transformation process, Philips Healthcare took their
executives to Silicon Valley to tour leading companies and learn how to be disruptive, create
great experiences, and drive growth. Executives came away with a strong desire to be more
customer focused, and wanted to clearly define what “customer obsession” meant to Philips.

To that end, they created a very basic “customer obsession framework” defined by six design
principles relevant to Philips to step up and further unlock a more customer-obsessed culture.
Business leaders across all business units and regions were then asked to frame their business
strategies, activities, and investments against those six design principles. Blake Cahill, Global
Digital Leader, SVP Global Head of Digital Marketing & Media at Philips Healthcare shared,
“Rather than spending quarters trying to create a perfect experience strategy before deploying,
we gave our leaders a very basic framework to unlock customer obsession principles in a leader-
led fashion within the activities they already controlled to further embed customer obsession in
the DNA of their businesses and markets.”

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

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CASE STUDY FOR SETTING GUIDING PRINCIPLES

Over the past five years, Piedmont Healthcare has made experience the center of their business
and brand strategy. Piedmont’s Chief Consumer Officer Matt Gove explained, “Our business
strategy is to differentiate on experience – to have people choose to come to Piedmont because
the experience is what they remember.” Gove explained that this focus on experience was
possible only because Piedmont CEO Kevin Brown made experience a foundational part of the
overall strategy. Gove recalled that there were very few senior executives who were not part of
the process, a process that included the Chief Medical officer, Head of Strategy, CIO, CFO, and
the CEO.

“Once it became clear that our customer experience strategy was

central to the 10-year plan, it became even more of a team effort.”
— Matt Gove, Piedmont Healthcare

To create alignment across

the organization, Piedmont
identified five patient
experience principles which it
codified into “The Piedmont
Way”. The patient experience
principles became both a
stimulus for idea development
and a filter for idea
prioritization. Over 100 possible
initiatives were identified and
then narrowed down to 10
focus areas and eventually two
experience initiatives. Gove
admitted that there wasn’t a
formula for making decisions,
recalling, “The paring down
exercise was based on the
Note: “The Piedmont Way” is the proprietary intellectual property of Piedmont Healthcare
team’s expertise, a gut feeling,
and balanced against what
was feasible from a time and
resource standpoint.”

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

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 3 Prioritize Experience Initiatives for Relevance
The third part of the strategy is identifying and prioritizing the initiatives you will take to
accomplish your experience vision and deepen relationships. And just as importantly, clarifying
what you WON’T do.

Here’s an example: A friend recently described an experience with United Airlines. He is an elite
frequent flyer and was signed into United.com, trying to book a trip. Unable to figure something
out, he called United on his mobile phone. The agent answered, “Hello, thank you for being a
Mileage Plus 1K member. I see that you were recently on our site searching for a trip. Are you
calling about that trip?”

My friend was floored and I was too. What United did was to prioritize this particular audience
(high-value frequent fliers) with a particular scenario (moving from Web to phone) that required
linking two data centers and systems, as well as the call center scripts and procedures. This
isn’t an overwhelming difficult integration to make, but it is hard to execute because it requires
cross-department and cross-channel coordination. United knew they couldn’t break down the
silos, so instead it created little windows just big enough for the right data “light” to move back
and forth. (Note: United Airlines may have delighted my friend, but much of that goodwill was
erased when a passenger was dragged off of a United flight.5 Guiding principles, created with
the relationships at the center of the strategy and spread throughout the organization, may have
helped prevent that incident from ever happening.)

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

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CASE STUDY FOR PRIORITIZING INITIATIVES

Manulife is a global insurance companies headquartered in Canada, operating in Canada

and Asia under the Manulife brand and in the US as John Hancock. Francesco Lagutaine, the
company’s Chief Marketing and Experience Designer Officer in Asia, shared that the company
is still in the early stages of its experience strategy journey but has focused on building
foundational capabilities, especially around a culture of listening 360 degrees from customers to
employees. In addition, the company has invested in core practices, such as customer-centered
product design, an innovation process that is checked against customer reactions, and, finally,
using Net Promoter Score (NPS) to check how experiences impact relationships.

Lagutaine shared that Manulife uses three criteria to determine which experience initiatives to prioritize:

• Highest customer impact. This could be the initiatives that affect the most customers or
something that is the most defining moment of an interaction with the company, such as
handling claims.

• Value creation. Lagutaine shared that one of the biggest challenges they faced as an
organization was shifting the mindset to one where creating customer value is tied to
business value. He shared, “A process-oriented company may talk about being customer-
centric but always sees it as a trade-off.” As such, Manulife prioritizes initiatives that create
the highest value to customers and connects it to clear business value.

• Ease of execution. “Success begets success, so you need a few quick wins,” Lagutaine
shared. One of the things Manulife did was to implement NPS, which not only got quick
traction at the front lines, but also changed the tone of executive commitment.

”The hardest part is financial transformation. The key is to

demonstrate that when done right, customer experience
initiatives are not just as profitable, but more profitable.”
— Francesco Lagutaine, Chief Marketing and Experience Design Officer in Asia, Manulife

One example of an experience initiative was Manulife’s “MOVE” initiative. It came out of
customer insights that people were measuring their physical activity and taking personal
accountability for their health. Participants earn points for walking, getting check-ups, and
reading online health articles that qualify them for rewards and even discounts on their life
insurance premiums. This program was developed in six weeks, a very short development time
that required the team to focus on leveraging customer insights, reducing complexity, and
ensuring that the program was financially sound.

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

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4 4 Align the Organization for Execution
As we saw from our consumer research, the biggest perceived miss is the lack of employee
training and organizational alignment around experience strategy priorities. That’s because the
natural organizational state of departmental silos means that each department looks only within
their part of the customer lifecycle and channels within their touchpoints. A robust experience
strategy will focus on not so much tearing down the silos as building windows between them to
allow the organization to operate more transparently. This makes it easier to create the seamless
experiences that customers want.

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

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CASE STUDY FOR ALIGNING YOUR ORGANIZATION

As a pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly is often several layers removed from the end customer.
As a result, it defines and measures its experience strategy more from the brand and loyalty
perspective across its diverse constituents of consumers, healthcare professionals, and caregivers.
While NPS is a key metric, there is also a strong overlay of loyalty objectives against business
objectives. Christine Hill, Global Customer Experience Strategy and Measurement Leader at Eli
Lilly, shared how they prepared the organization to execute on their experience strategy:

“There’s no one way to do customer experience. You have to know your

organization, meet people where they are, and help move them forward.”
— Christine Hill, Eli Lilly

• Engage leadership. Lilly saw a leadership change with a new CEO, David Ricks, starting on
January 1st of this year, and with it, a renewed focus on customers and their experiences. Hill
shared that “experience” is a frequent discussion point for Ricks, with customer experience
becoming a higher priority. Although experience is not yet a mandate, experience
measurements like NPS are now on corporate scorecards.
• Plan for employee engagement. Lilly expects experience to be a differentiator when it
comes to its culture, where it becomes a lever to deepen employee engagement around the
purpose of their work — to save lives. Hill shared, “Employees need to feel like they matter
as humans — customer experience will plateau if we don’t focus on the employee experience
as well.” To that end, Lilly makes it a priority to connect people across the organization to
employees on the front lines, more closely connecting everyone to their common mission.
• Equip experience leaders to drive change in the right places. Given the diverse nature of
experience initiatives at Lilly, Hill supports 200 people scattered among various business units
with a “CX Community” that encourages consistency and equips them with tools and skills
to drive changes within their respective organizations. Her core CX team has seven full-time
employees who standardize tools and create auditable standards and act as an internal
consulting resource. For example, one business leader in a non-customer-facing role decided
to embed customer experience principles in their process improvement plans. “We work with
leaders within the organization who want to make changes,” Hill explained, allowing her to
apply her limited where they can make the biggest difference.
• Hire the right people. The core team of seven people driving CX at Lilly come from a diverse
background, with the common element being that they are people with a great deal of cross-
functional experience. Hill observed, “The most successful are those that demonstrate a
high left-brain/right-brain ability. They can see the possible and then use high EQ [emotional
intelligence] to pull through to execution.” For example, one team member who has an
engineering undergrad and MBA could map out what processes were needed to create the
experience. They could also understand the limitations of process and see how the humanity
piece could fill the gaps.  

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

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ENDNOTES
1
Sorofman, Jake. “Gartner Surveys Confirm Customer Experience Is the New Battlefield.” Gartner Surveys
Confirm Customer Experience Is the New Battlefield - Jake Sorofman, Gartner, 23 Oct. 2014, blogs.gartner.com/
jake-sorofman/gartner-surveys-confirm-customer-experience-new-battlefield/.
2
“Customers 2020.” Customers 2020: The Future of B-to-B Customer Experience, Walker Information Inc., www.
walkerinfo.com/walkerinfo/customers2020/.
3
Strange, Adario. “Facebook F8: Everything you need to know.” Mashable, Mashable, 12 Apr. 2016, mashable.
com/2016/04/12/facebook-10-year-plan/#K6iKJQXXsGq1.
4
“Amazon’s global career site.” Amazon.jobs, www.amazon.jobs/en-gb/principles. Accessed 7 May 2017.
5
Victor, Daniel, and Matt Stevens. “United Airlines Passenger Is Dragged From an Overbooked Flight.” The
New York Times, The New York Times, 10 Apr. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/business/united-flight-
passenger-dragged.html.
* Additional data cuts by geography, gender, and age are available online at http://bit.ly/cx-cl-071117

METHODOLOGY
As part of this research, Altimeter conducted an online survey in June 2017 of 1,412 respondents across the
United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, and Japan. Geographic and gender breakouts of the data are
available online. We also interviewed 17 market influencers, technology vendors, brands. Our deepest gratitude
to the following:.

BRANDS
AMD: Ron Myers, Corporate Vice President – Marketing
Casper: Michael Kim, Senior Director, Commercial Strategy & Planning
Eli Lilly: Christine M. Hill, Global Customer Experience Strategy and Measurement Leader
GE: Steve Pepe, Director, Commercial Marketing
IBM: Paul Papas, Global Leader, IBM Interactive Experience – IBM Global Business Services
Manulife: Francesco Lagutaine, Chief Marketing and Experience Design Officer
Philips: Blake Cahill, SVP Global Head of Digital Marketing & Media
The Learning Experience: Reamonn Smale, Senior Vice President (Head of Marketing)
Piedmont Healthcare: Matt Gove, Chief Consumer Officer
University of Texas System: Phil Komarny, Chief Digital Officer; Marni Baker Stein, Chief Innovation Officer; Liz Gonzalez

TECHNOLOGY VENDORS & SERVICE PROVIDERS

Adobe: Adam Justis, Director Product Marketing – Adobe Marketing Cloud
ForeSee: Shannon Latta, Vice President of Communications; Eric Feinberg, Vice President, Marketing; Lenny
Nash, Chief Strategy Officer; Christine Tran, Product Marketing Lead
Jumpshot: Deren Baker, CEO
OneSpot: Steve Sachs, CEO
Oracle: Scott Eggleston, Senior Director, Customer Experience Product Strategy; Mike Seback, Director Analyst
Relations
Qubit: Graham Cooke, Founder & CEO; Jay McCarthy, Vice President – Product Marketing
Salesforce: Vala Afshar, Chief Digital Evangelist; Brielle Nikaido, Director, Market Strategy
Sprinklr: Ragy Thomas, Founder & CEO

OPEN RESEARCH
This independent research report was 100% funded by Altimeter, A Prophet Company. This report is published under the
principle of Open Research and is intended to advance the industry at no cost. This report is intended for you to read, utilize, and
share with others; if you do so, please provide attribution to Altimeter, A Prophet Company.

PERMISSIONS
The Creative Commons License is Attribution-NoncommercialShareAlike 3.0 United States, which can be found at https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/.

DISCLAIMER
ALTHOUGH THE INFORMATION AND DATA USED IN THIS REPORT HAVE BEEN PRODUCED AND PROCESSED FROM SOURCES BELIEVED TO BE RELIABLE, NO WARRANTY EXPRESSED
OR IMPLIED IS MADE REGARDING THE COMPLETENESS, ACCURACY, ADEQUACY, OR USE OF THE INFORMATION. THE AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS OF THE INFORMATION AND
DATA SHALL HAVE NO LIABILITY FOR ERRORS OR OMISSIONS CONTAINED HEREIN OR FOR INTERPRETATIONS THEREOF. REFERENCE HEREIN TO ANY SPECIFIC PRODUCT OR VENDOR
BY TRADE NAME, TRADEMARK,
OR OTHERWISE DOES NOT CONSTITUTE OR IMPLY ITS ENDORSEMENT, RECOMMENDATION, OR FAVORING BY THE AUTHORS OR CONTRIBUTORS
AND SHALL NOT BE USED FOR ADVERTISING OR PRODUCT ENDORSEMENT PURPOSES. THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED HEREIN ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE.

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

24
 About Charlene Li, About Altimeter, a Prophet Company
Principal Analyst
Altimeter, a Prophet company, is a research
and strategy consulting firm that helps
Charlene (@CharleneLi) is a
companies understand and take advantage
Principal Analyst at Altimeter,
of digital disruption. In 2015, Prophet
a Prophet company, where she
acquired Altimeter Group to bring forward-
helps leaders thrive with disruption. She
thinking digital research and strategy
was the Founder and CEO of Altimeter
consulting together under one umbrella
Group prior to its joining Prophet, and
and to help clients unlock the power of
she is the author of the New York Times
digital transformation.
bestseller, Open Leadership. She is also
the coauthor of the critically acclaimed, Altimeter, founded in 2008 by best-selling
bestselling book Groundswell. Her most author Charlene Li, focuses on research in
recent book, The Engaged Leader, is a digital transformation, social business and
call to business leaders to adapt to the governance, customer experience, big
digital landscape, and revolutionize their data, and content strategy.
relationships by connecting directly with
their followers. Her current research
focuses on customer experience strategy Altimeter, a Prophet Company
and employee engagement and she’s One Bush Street, 7th Floor
working on a new book on disruption San Francisco, CA 94104
strategies. You can reach Charlene at [email protected]
[email protected]. www.altimetergroup.com
@altimetergroup
415-363-0004

HOW TO WORK WITH US

Altimeter can support your experience strategy efforts in the following ways:
• Speak about how to develop relationship-building experiences. Whether you’re kicking
off a major event or want to instill the importance of experience in your employees, we will
energize and inform your audience. Every speech is tailored to the needs of your audience,
incorporating relevant experience strategy examples.
• Educate and align leadership with an experience strategy maturity assessment and
workshop. An assessment of your experience strategy maturity lays the foundation for an
executive workshop that creates a robust experience strategy that spans across departments.
Altimeter workshops are custom-designed interactive sessions where participants carry out
a number of training activities rather than passively listen to a lecture or presentation. Our
workshops are action-oriented, educational and practical..
• Create and activate an experience strategy. Working closely with our consulting
colleagues at Prophet Brand Strategy, Altimeter creates a multi-year experience strategy that
takes into account all four steps of the strategy process, from understanding next generation
customers to organizational alignment. Learn more at https://www.prophet.com/expertise/
customer-experience.
Interested in working with us? Contact us at [email protected]

www.altimetergroup.com | Experience Strategy: Connecting Customer Experience to Business Strategy | [email protected]

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