The Online Customer Experience – It’s more important than ever before.

Just finished reading a great article by John Gaffney Executive Editor, Publications for 1to1 Media. In it he reviews several highlights of a new research study from UK based analytics firm Foviance. In the study, researchers found that top publicly traded firms were now placing higher priority on the online customer experience than the traditional offline experience. And most important, 96% of the companies surveyed said they planned to focus more energy on the online experience than the offline customer experience.

This shift in priorities has implications that go to the very core of the way retailers, marketers and in fact any company interacts with their customers and stakeholders online. Think about it. Where once unhappy customers were relegated to dealing with an anonymous person working within the bowels of the “consumer affairs department”, any unhappy online customer can now, at the click of a button take their complaint public via blogs, podcasts or community spaces like myspace.

No longer is the customer experience something that is shared on an individual level. If you as a company drop the ball and your customer has an unhappy online experience, sooner or later the world is going to hear about it.

It’s time to recognize that your customer’s online experience is as important or even more important than their offline interaction with your company. Make sure you allocate time and resources to monitor and track all your customer experience touch-points and you won’t be sorry.