We just published our first report of the year, Customer Experience Accelerates In 2011. It examines results from a survey of 170 decision makers in organizations with at least $1 billion in annual revenues. The analysis looks at how companies view their  customer experience efforts in 2010 and their plans for 2011.

One thing is very clear, customer experience activity is going to increase this year. Here's one of the 20 figures from the report:

We also published another report since our last newsletter, Evaluating Online Store Locators. The report used Temkin Group's SLICE-B Experience Assessment to examine the experience of finding a store/branch on the Websites of five large retailers (Home Depot, Kroger, Target, Walgreens, and Walmart) and five large banks (Bank of America, Citibank, Chase, US Bancorp, and Wells Fargo).

As you can see from this chart, Wells Fargo's experience came out on top and Target's fell to the bottom.

• Customer Experience Was Born In 1994. Using a new tool from Google that allows people to analyze the content from more than 500 million books over the last five centuries, I examined the rise (and fall) of terms like "customer experience" and "customer relationship management." 
• Customer Experience Matter's 8-word mission. Based on a suggestion for building mission statements, here's what I came up with for my blog: "Propel executives to think strategically about customer experience."
• Take Customer-Insightful Actions. I identify six areas of actions that companies should take based on insights form their VoC programs.
• Looking Back At 2010 And The Top 25 Posts. I looked back at the most popular posts from my blog in 2011. No surprise, the top post was my Free eBook: 6 Laws Of Customer Experience.
• Quick 6 with customer experience leaders. This series of posts is a Q&A with different customer experience leaders. Learn more about these execs:
   
• Steve Furman from Discover Financial
• Graham Webster from Telefonica
• Doug Meyer from Sage Software

I also added a category to the blog called "Planning For 2011" that links to a number of posts that help develop your customer experience plans.

• Assessments of customer experience efforts, to identify gaps and opportunities to accelerate your transformation efforts
• Speeches and webinars on a wide range of customer experience and leadership topics
• Interactive workshops for executive teams or other groups to gain alignment around key customer experience principles and priorities or to develop plans in areas such as voice of the customer programs
• Educational curriculum to establish and reinforce an understanding of proven customer experience principles across an organization
• Strategy reviews of marketing and product plans for vendors who want to help companies transform their customer experience