Harley Manning

Harley founded Forrester's customer experience research practice when he joined the firm in 1998. Today he leads a team of analysts that cover enterprise-level customer experience topics ranging from strategy to metrics and business models.

At Forrester, Harley has authored many top-read reports. His first report, "Why Most Websites Fail", beat out dozens of other Forrester reports to win the company's best research award for that quarter. It also launched the firm's Website Review methodology, which has now been used to evaluate more than 1,500 sites for both research and consulting purposes. In subsequent reports, he created Forrester's methodologies for evaluating website brand experience and for modeling the ROI from customer experience improvement projects.

A highly rated speaker with a love of the stage, Harley is the founder of Forrester's annual Marketing Forum as well as its Customer Experience Forum, which he hosts and moderates. This year, the Customer Experience Forum drew a crowd of 1,300 attendees and became the firm's largest event.

Prior to joining Forrester, Harley spent 18 years designing and building interactive services for companies including Dow Jones, AT&T, the pioneering online service Prodigy, and Sears. He developed his love of research while he was at AT&T Bell Labs, where he was brought in to design user-friendly interfaces for inventions in the field of applied artificial intelligence.