LRA Worldwide Participates in Study on Customer Experience Design for Service

HORSHAM, Pennsylvania; December 19, 2007 – LRA Worldwide, Inc., one of the leaders in the rapidly-growing field of Customer Experience Management, recently participated in a study titled “Customer Experience (cX) Design for Services.” The multi-phased study brought together thought leaders in customer experience, consulting and industry to better understand and codify the current models in use for experience design and improve upon them.

The most recent meeting of the study members took place in September in Washington, DC at the Hotel Palomar, where LRA joined industry leaders from companies such as McDonald’s, UPS, Dow Corning and The Hartford. LRA’s CEO, Rob Rush, and Senior Vice President of Research, Rob Kaplan-Sherman, were featured speakers on the agenda, presenting a topic entitled “The End of cX as a Faith-Based Initiative.” Rush and Kaplan-Sherman’s presentation focused on how certain types of quantitative research designs can predict and measure the value of changes in the customer experience.

“For customer experience design to become a mainstream business practice, it is vitally important that it can be definitively linked to tangible financial returns,” explained Tim Ogilvie, CEO of Peer Insight, the study's sponsor. “Everyone intuitively ‘gets’ why cX is important, but LRA is doing some important work helping its clients quantify the impact of customer experience, both good and bad. Their presentation provided our study with key insights into how cX is poised to shift from one based in faith to finance.”

“Traditional customer satisfaction studies frequently fail because executives have ‘faith’ that increasing customer satisfaction will positively impact other business outcomes,” said Kaplan-Sherman. “Our approach is to eliminate that leap and directly link cX enhancements to specific business outcomes.”

The session in Washington, DC was the second of five planned meetings, each of which is followed by a debriefing and confidential research paper. Participating companies were chosen for the study based on their innovative approaches to customer experience design in the workplace, and donated their time in exchange for access to the proprietary findings.

LRA’s Research practice works with industry leaders like the PGA TOUR, Toll Brothers and Hyatt Hotels Corporation on “experience optimization” studies where the findings can be validated against predefined business goals and metrics.