My opening keynote speech at Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum was titled “Charting Your Customer Experience Journey Through Tough Times.”  I made a lot of references to Dorothy’s journey in The Wizard Of Oz.

Dorothy had to overcome a lot of obstacles (flying monkeys, cranky witches, etc.). It turns out that the key ingredients to her success are also the key ingredients for a company’s customer experience efforts in these tough economic times:

• Heart: These economic times are unsettling for customers and employees. So companies need to raise the bar on their empathy to cater to the changing needs of customers and to build engagement with employees.
• Brains: It’s easy to make sweeping across the board cuts to respond to a tough economy. But companies need to think more deeply about their business to distinguish what’s really important (and shouldn’t be cut) from those things that are not important (and can be cut).
• Courage: While the natural tendency is to get into a defensive mode during a recession, companies need to prepare for the future and strengthen their business. I referenced this quote from John F. Kennedy:

The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis.’ One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity.

There’s some debate as to the accuracy of JFK’s interpretation of the Chinese characters, but the sentiment is absolutely correct!

I ended my presentation with a rewritten version of the song “Somewhere Over The Rainbow.” Here are the lyrics:

There was a lot more in my speech, like the Yellow Brick Road of customer experience maturity. So I’ll be writing more about my comments and other parts of the forum over the next week.  Stay tuned!

The bottom line: Don’t wait for a wizard to improve your customer experience