According to Forrester, and based on the research they carried out with 100 companies, there seems to be profound and widespread confusion about what innovation is and isn't, and a very large proportion of it turns out to be a waste of time and money.

Sixty percent of companies in the survey said they wanted to differentiate themselves by innovating customer experience. Many of them have dedicated innovation budgets and personnel and two-thirds claim to have delivered 'innovative customer experiences' over the past 12 months.

However, most of these efforts remain incremental in impact, rather than being radical innovation: people seem to confuse the two. Companies often 'innovate' things customers don't even want. And it turns out that a massive amount of innovation is 'innovation for the sake of it', rather than delivering any actual customer value or delivering against a real business case. Hilariously, 'copycatting' is massive: around 60-70% of companies surveyed reported that their customer experience innovations were driven by watching what other companies are doing... It kind of beggar's belief. It's all a bit of a horror show.

Despite, or perhaps because of over-excessive and self-aggrandising use of the word itself, it's not getting better. Forrester have been tracking success in CX since 2007 as part of the Social Technographics survey and *what it doesn't show is that companies are learning from their mistakes and getting better. *

All this is important because customer experience is a key battleground, and these companies are right to want to differentiate themselves with better CX. As users we all know that. Customers have absurdly high expectations, and they're not getting any less absurd any time soon. It's terribly unfair - but the truth is they judge you by the best experiences they just had. Their tolerance is very low. And it's a war out there: competitive advantage is short-lived and don't expect any loyalty.