It’s 2010! If 2009 was a downturn, surely, this 2010, we will see things moving up.

However, be it downturn or upturn in economy, there is one thing that doesn’t get affected—the customer experience. Business as usual for all companies, and so how do you maximize the customer experience.

Bruce Temkin has a good list to keep your customer experience efforts on track:

         1. Drop the executive commitment facade. It’s very easy for executives to say “customer   experience is important.” But it’s much more difficult for them to dedicate the time and energy required to make it a real priority. So in 2010, executives should either get actively involved in customer experience transformation or drop it from their agendas.

Start here: Develop a customer experience dashboard and manage the results with the same energy that you manage financial results.

2. Acknowledge that you don’t know your customers. When market research teams require long lead times and expensive projects to answer questions about customers, too many organizations go without this insight. But the path to customer experience success requires significantly deeper customer insight. So in 2010, companies need to develop voice of the customer programs that provide ongoing and continuous access to customer insights.

Start here: Create a voice-of-the-customer program with a cross-functional team that focuses on four “LIRM” components: listening to customers, interpreting the feedback, reacting to the insights and monitoring results from actions over time.

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