• Brandweek, Forbes CMO Network, Bloomberg BusinessWeek , Thursday, January 14, 2010 10:44 AM

Barnes & Noble is the top brand when it comes to the customer's experience, followed by Marriott Hotels & Resorts, Hampton Inn/Suites, Amazon.com and Holiday Inn Express, according to a Forrester Research survey of more than 4,600 U.S. consumers. Only 13 of the 113 firms listed in "Customer Experience Index, 2010" garnered an "excellent" customer experience rating, Elena Malykhina reports. Thirty-five received a "good" rating, 40 got "okay", and 45 received either a "poor" or "very poor" rating.

Writing for Forbes CMO Network, Bruce D. Temkin, Forrester's vp and principal analyst, offers the firm's "Three Golden Rules Of Customer Experience": 1. Obsess about customer needs, not product features. 2. Reinforce the brand with every interaction, not just communications. 3. Treat customer experience as a competence, not a function. Then he details what Forrester calls a voice of the customer (VoC) program that contains four elements: Listen, Interpret, Respond and Monitor.

Over in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Helen Walters blogs that one surprising finding of the survey is that "consumers don't dig Apple iTunes." For all its game-changing innovation, it finished at No. 46 in terms of user experience. "ITunes can be confusing, overwhelming and often less than entirely elegant," Walter writes. "As such, it really doesn't live up to the sophistication of the company's other lauded design and branding elements."

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