"State of the Customer Experience 2010"

To understand what companies are up to in their customer experience endeavors, Forrester surveyed 141 executives from large North American firms.

It turns out that 90% of respondents think that customer experience is very important for their companies and 80% are trying to use it as an area of differentiation. While the lack of funding was the top problem last year, the lack of a clear strategy has emerged as this year's No. 1 obstacle. There's a lot of activity underway: 62% of companies have a voice of the customer (VoC) program, and nearly half have an executive in charge of their overall customer experience efforts. Forrester's data shows that companies with this type of leadership have fewer obstacles and are more mature in their customer experience efforts.