Earlier this year Forrester Research, Inc., published its “2013 Customer Experience Predictions” report (January 2013) based on interviews with leading chief customer officers about their biggest challenges and priorities for 2013. Forrester found that over the past two years, consumer technology adoption and market forces have catapulted the field of customer experience into strategic stature.

Forrester’s Customer Experience (CX) Predictions for 2013 include the following:

• In 2013 tenure in the CX field will drive radically different behaviors – what stage of the game are the early adopters, mainstreamers and late adopters in CX

• Early adopters will evolve their organizations into well-oiled CX machines – what the leaders in the field are doing to get the most out of their Big Data and understand customer experience

• Early adopters and serious mainstreamers will dig for deeper customer insight

• Late adopters will face death by a thousand shortcuts (in other words, there are no shortcuts!)

I’ll be penning a four-part blog series that will highlight Forrester’s CX predictions as they relate to how leading companies are leveraging Big Data to truly understand customer experience and behavior. Each will focus on how the industry is getting good, quality data to make the most of all that Big Data has to offer. Additionally, I’ll dive into each one of the predictions with some additional perspective on users who are unlocking the Big Data “gold mine” in their networks for better insight into customer experience.

This is the first post of the series, focusing on the first prediction above. Even though CX has become top of mind for companies – as seen in C-level priorities, communities centered around CX, major media coverage, and technology investments – maturity varies and will continue to for the next decade.

 So what are early adopters doing to get the most out of their Big Data and understand customer experience?

According to Forrester, early adopters will evolve their organizations into well-oiled CX machines. As part of this, CX professionals will start aligning with BPI, and create processes and methodologies. Organizations will evolve to support the greater emphasis on CX across the board. At Cloudmeter customer sites we’re seeing a new organization emerge as “MarkOps” where Marketing and Operations meet. CX professionals are at the center of these two organizations. Understanding customer experience is the ultimate goal for MarkOps.

Forrester also predicts that customer experience professionals will chase employee engagement. The early adopters know that to be successful, they must strive for a customer-centric culture, which is closely related to employee engagement. There’s been much in the news about this recently – that companies who do not focus on customers first will fail, and that it needs to be omnipresent at every level. To be the next Apple, Amazon or Zappos.com, a customer experience culture needs to be at its core.

Finally, Forrester predicts exponential growth in customer experience jobs. Customer experience experts will be in high demand. The new MarkOps will house new jobs that focus on customer experience. We believe there’s a huge opportunity for CX professionals to take on a strategic role in MarkOps to drive their company’s success. In fact we’re already seeing our CX customers become more central to their organization’s business.

These are just a few of the organizational changes early adopters are making in their quests to deliver awesome customer experience. In the next blog, we’ll talk about some of the technologies they are embracing to get there. Stay tuned.