Aircel, BSNL and Many Indian Firms Provide Mediocre Customer Experiences: Forrester

In a damning revelation by Forrester, majority of Indian firms deliver mediocre customer experiences;and if that is not enough about 3% is rated "Very Poor".

According to Forrester, "Improving the customer experience (CX) is a top priority for 71% of businesses in India, yet not a single Indian company evaluated in Forrester’s Customer Experience Index earn an ‘excellent’ customer experience ranking. In fact, 60% of firms deliver merely mediocre customer experience, according to the new research by Principal Analyst Ryan Hart, and 3% fall in the extreme category of “very poor”.

Only 9% of companies landed in the “good” category and another 28% received “poor” scores for their CX. The report, to be launched later today at Forrester's CMO+CIO Summit in Mumbai, is based on a survey of more than 17,000 metro Indian consumers. It ranks the quality of customer experience and the impact on customer loyalty of 102 brands in 10 industries, by assessing three dimensions of CX quality: effectiveness, ease, and emotion.

Credit card providers are the leading industry in this year’s CX Index, followed by mobile device manufacturers and banks. The Financial Services industry as a whole sets the CX bar to which other industries can aspire towards: 7 of the top 9 brands on the list are private banks, 4 of which are also top-ranking credit card providers.

This mirrors the trend Forrester sees in other global markets such as Australia, Canada, China, Germany, the UK and the U.S., where financial institutions are leveraging mobile to enhance cross-channel experiences for its customers.

Forrester says that despite this year’s standings, brands have multiple opportunities to improve their CX quality, including meeting the basic needs of their customers, searching across industries for CX best practice inspiration and focusing on winning over customer emotion. Forrester’s analysis shows that, of the three Es, emotion has the most influence on customers’ perception of their experience, making them feel more valued. Customer experience leaders made customers feel valued almost twice as often as CX laggards did.

The best and worst performing brands in India by industry: