Today’s interview is with Martin Gill, VP, Research Director at Forrester. Martin joins me today to talk about their upcoming CX Summit EMEA that will be taking place in London (and digitally) from June 2–4, 2025. We explore the major themes of the event, including why businesses need to invest in both brand and customer experience to maximise growth, what practitioners should be keeping in mind when thinking about design for the future of experiences and the role of organisational culture and leadership in all of that.

You can find out more about the event here. Also, if you use the discount code CXEMEAPUNK, you’ll get 10% off the ticket price.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Legacy transformation, agentic AI and how to get it right – Interview with Don Schuerman of Pega – and is number 539 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Martin:

• Martin’s background started off in a shipyard on the River Tyne and ended up Research Director for a global research firm.
• The overall theme of the upcoming event is total experience.
• Our research and data show that CX scores are declining. Customers’ perceptions of the experience brands are giving them are declining worldwide.
• It’s falling dramatically in America. It’s flatlined in Singapore and Australia. It’s starting to dip in the UK and many European countries.
• The reason it is falling is that firms are failing at the basics.
• The reasons behind this include:
  • The complexity brands face,
  • That many firms are trying to do everything on every single channel. Or worse, they are forcing customers onto channels that they don’t want to use, and
  • Overall, customers are finding things harder. It’s harder and harder for customers to get things done.
• We’ve been measuring that for 15 years. We’ve also, for about five years, been measuring brand experience and brand energy.
• In customer experience, we measure ease, effectiveness, and emotion.
• In brand, we measure fit, salience, and trust.
• For the first time this year, we’ve run a single unified survey where we’ve brought the customer experience and the brand experience together into one single score.
• We’re going to talk about combining these two things, so how you set brand expectations on one side and deliver against them with the experience you create.
• The emotions that drive the most loyalty in your customers for most industries are confident, understood, respected, and valued.
• There’s a massive over-focus in CX and executive teams on the score (metric) rather than what the score means.
• NPS is not dead; just the way we’ve implemented it is very flawed in a lot of cases.
• The number two reason why CX teams tell us they invest in CX is to improve their CX score.
• Our preliminary research suggests that firms with aligned experience (i.e. alignment between brand and CX) experience two to three times the level of revenue growth.
• Across the 11 industries we studied, only airlines and investment firms get more by making more promoters. Every other industry gets a bigger bang for its buck if you reduce the number of detractors (i.e. reduce the number of negative experiences).
• Our data suggests that problem resolution is the journey that’s most predictive of relationship success across all three industries.
• Trust often feels like something you can’t measure, but we have a framework that breaks it down to seven different levers, like dependability, accountability, transparency, things like that.
• The higher that the trust index score goes, the more likely customers are to say positive things like, “I will forgive this brand for mistakes,” or “I will recommend it.”
• The more that you trust the brand, the more you’re going to forgive it for a mistake.
• I’ve seen so many journey maps where you look at them and you go that’s a process map. That’s your internal process.
• The pace of change is getting faster. But, we genuinely think the cycle times for adoption is getting shorter and shorter and shorter.
• AI is going to become a real accelerator because our ability to crunch that data and do something with it and create a next best experience is massively accelerated. But the context dimension to that is an important consideration.
• To really change your culture, you’ve got to change the rituals, artifacts, and behaviors of people on a daily basis.
• Every leader needs to become a change leader. Executives globally reported a 183 % increase in the amount of change they have to manage.
• Martin’s best advice: Stop admiring your problems. Start driving change. Start small, control the scope, pick a product, pick a service, pick one use case. Do journey mapping, identify the problems. Benchmark where you are. Change something, see what happens.
• Martin’s Punk CX brand: Octopus

About Martin

Martin leads Forrester’s European-based research team focusing on the intersection between customer experience (CX), brand, and privacy. His research helps CX leaders, CMOs, and security and privacy professionals respond to the changing nature of today’s empowered consumers.

Find out more about Forrester here and do check out their upcoming CX EMEA Summit here (and don’t forget to use the discount code CXEMEAPUNK as it’ll get you 10% off the ticket price). Finally, say Hi to them and Martin on X (Twitter) @forrester and @martinjohngill respectively and feel free to connect with Martin on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Photo by Edge2Edge Media on Unsplash