Joint Research Effort to Explore Best Practices for Creating Integrated Customer Experiences
New York — May 23, 2005 — As companies strive to establish new and better ways to interact with customers in increasingly competitive markets, Agency.com (www.agency.com), a full service interactive agency, and Marketspace LLC (a unit of Cambridge-based Monitor Group), a strategic advisory firm that specializes in optimizing customer interactions, have formed a research consortium to explore best practices for creating integrated customer experiences – both on and offline.
A new book by Marketspace founders Jeffrey F. Rayport and Bernard J. Jaworski from HBS Press, Best Face Forward: Why Companies Must Improve Their Service Interfaces with Customers (January 2005), inspired the two companies to join forces to engage the research effort. The book, Best Face Forward (www.bestfaceforward.info), argues that a service revolution is taking place as technology increasingly provides innovative ways for companies to create more effective and efficient interfaces with their customers.
“Companies are struggling to establish new sources of sustainable advantage as offerings and brands proliferate in nearly every sector of the economy,” said Rayport. “Such competitive intensity has elevated customer experience to an unprecedented level of priority. As new front-office technologies – websites, kiosks, and call centers – have taken hold, smart companies are showing they can enhance the quality of interactions with their customers while driving down the costs of serving them. Realizing such results, however, critically depends on getting innovative combinations of people and technology right. That’s why Agency.com, with its long history of delivering interactive services to Fortune 500 companies, is the ideal partner for this research.”
Drawing on the author’s work inside both start-up and established businesses, Best Face Forward offers guiding principles and a practical auditing tool for determining how people and machines can best collaborate in mediating critical customer interactions. Together, Agency.com and Marketspace will further explore the opportunities and challenges involved in integrating traditional services with automated service interfaces such as websites, kiosks, and call centers. Using sophisticated diagnostic tools, the joint research team will help over 30 Fortune 500 companies uncover common themes. The ultimate goal is to identify best practices for creating an optimal customer experience across all touch-points linking companies and their customers.
“In today’s world of disjointed and fragmented communications, we believe that digital interactions must fit seamlessly into the customer journey,” said Don Scales, president & CEO, Agency.com. “Best Face Forward is in complete alignment with Agency.com’s focus – helping clients thread customer experiences into a single coherent journey. With the help of our clients, we look forward to working with Jeffrey to extend this important research.”
The research will span two methodological tracks. One track will compare the customer experience of interfaces and interface systems across different industries through an expert evaluation approach. The second track will involve an in-depth focus on customer experience in one industry. The primary research instrument will be a proprietary survey, which will uncover how each interface is used at different points in a typical buying process and how the hand-offs between interfaces impact the overall customer experience.
Marketspace LLC operates three businesses offering strategic advisory, executive development, and software development services. Marketspace Advisory develops strategies for clients to drive profitable growth by improving interactions and relationships with customers. Monitor Executive Development is a leading provider of customized executive development programs designed support clients’ formulation and execution of corporate strategy. Monitor Software develops Web-enabled applications that help client organizations address strategic business challenges with client solutions in marketing, innovation, human resources, and organizational development. Marketspace is headquartered in Boston and has offices in New York and Santa Monica. For more information, visit www.marketspaceglobal.com. Marketspace LLC is a business unit of Monitor Group, the Cambridge-based global strategic advisory and merchant banking firm founded in 1983.
Agency.com is a full-service interactive agency. Since 1995, the company has created effective interactive marketing campaigns and world-class websites to help global clients – including 3M, British Airways, BrownCo, Discovery Channel, T-Mobile UK and Visa – get and keep customers online. Agency.com is headquartered in New York and has offices in Amsterdam, Chicago, Dallas, London and San Francisco. For more information, visit www.agency.com. Agency.com is a subsidiary of the Omnicom Group Inc. (NYSE:OMC), a Fortune 500 global advertising, marketing and communications company. Omnicom's branded networks and numerous specialty firms provide advertising, strategic media planning and buying, direct and promotional marketing, public relations and other specialty communications services to over 5,000 clients in more than 100 countries.
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Tari Ray
Director of Marketing & PR
Agency.com
312.729.4537
tray@agency.com
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