I recently kicked off a blog series highlighting Forrester Research Inc.’s January, 2013 report: “2013 Customer Experience Predictions” as they relate to how leading companies are leveraging Big Data to truly understand customer experience and behavior.

To briefly recap, 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!)

In Part 1, I focused on Forrester’s first two predictions and what early adopters are doing to get the most out of their Big Data in order to truly understand customer experience. The goal of this blog series is to dive into each of the predictions and provide additional perspective on users who are unlocking the Big Data “gold mine” in their networks to achieve better insight into customer experience.

This time around I’ll focus on the last two predictions –the importance of having quality data to drive more relevant insights, and customer experience and how there are no shortcuts to achieving customer experience success.

Starting with the right data

We hear a lot about Big Data. But the problem is as marketing organizations race to better understand and interact with customers, they don’t always have the “quality data” they need. They have lots of data, but do they have the “data they need”? Most of today’s firms don’t really know who their customers are. They don’t have the right data, the right people to analyze it or the right tools to analyze the data with.

Companies need customer insights in order to drive customer experience, and they often wonder how they can get a good understanding of their customers to better serve them. The solution lies in the ability to collect the right data to both drive customers through the Discover, Explore, Buy and Engage phases of the customer lifecycle, and answer questions about retention, acquisition, spending behavior, targeting and offer management. High-quality data drives better customer insights, which in turn can improve the customers’ experience and the business outcome.

In our recent  webinar, which featured Forrester, we talked about the prediction that “Big Data” will become “Right Data.” The future of customer insights is leveraging the right data to drive insights. This means having a high-quality data feed to the various analytics solutions in place in each stage of the customer lifecycle.

What does it mean to have a high-quality data feed?

1) It means complete. You should be able to capture everything related to the customer experience and behavior. It is important to avoid any blind spots.

2) Although you should capture everything, you don’t want to feed your analytics solution with everything. You want to feed it with only the most relevant information. On the fly, you should be able to filter, transform and enrich the data with the most relevant information before feeding it to your analytics solution of choice.

3) Finally, your customers operate in real-time, so should your analytics. To get there, it’s not enough to have an analytics solution that operates in real-time. You also need to feed it with real-time data.

Shifting to Forrester’s last and major prediction for CX in 2013 is that “late adopters will face death by a thousand shortcuts.” In other words, there are no good shortcuts when ensuring customer success. Based on my own experience, here are three relevant points:

1) The time is now to get serious about CX, and in order to do that right, quick fixes or one-off projects won’t work. Organizations need to create a CX culture across the board. I’ve discussed before the emergence of a new organization called “MarkOps” where understanding CX is the ultimate goal for MarkOps professionals.

2) Big Data is not enough – organizations need to make sure they have the right data available for analysis. Companies must watch out for blind spots, as they can lead to missing critical information and a skewed overall picture of a customer’s experience and behavior. You need to capture everything that can influence the customer’s experience and behavior. After capturing everything, you can focus on feeding analytics solutions with the data that matters most.

3) And finally, marketers will mistake messaging for experience improvements if they are not careful. We’ve seen customers learn this firsthand once they took hold of the reins on customer experience. One customer thought they understood customer experience, and then realized they had been wrong in 40 percent of their assumptions. How does this happen? In another example, a customer thought changes marketing made to their product positioning caused sales and conversions to go down. What they did not realize was that at the same time some critical pages were having an application error.

Without having visibility into all of that information, both marketing and IT might come to the conclusion that the new positioning was to blame. Without access to this critical quality data, companies could easily misinterpret signs of brand perception or customer experience.

Forrester recommends that organizations accelerate – don’t shortcut – the path to customer experience success. There’s a reason customer experience leaders, such as Southwest Airlines or Zappos are at the top – they’ve either nurtured a customer-centric culture from day one, or they’ve made a concerted effort to turn their organizations around over the course of many years.