CX All The Talk, But What’s Preventing Businesses From Walking The Walk?

More than 100 businesses offered a candid self-assessment of how they are adapting to the challenges of a market increasingly driven by the customer experience.

With the worldwide e-commerce market expected to reach nearly $2 trillion this year, providing exceptional digital experiences is now critical to business success. But with fewer than one in 10 organisations offering standout experiences to their website visitors, much work needs to be done, according to our new report, “Digital Experiences in the Age of the Customer.”

We invited 110 businesses to give a candid self-assessment of how they are adapting to the challenges of a market increasingly driven by the customer experience. Of the organisations surveyed:

• Seven in 10 reported that they lack resources to improve online customer experiences.
• Ninety-six percent now measure customer experience in some form.
• Less than half share digital customer experience insights with their customer services teams.

The report also reveals the challenges businesses are facing in the pursuit of a successful customer-experience strategy:

• Room for improvement: Just 7% of the businesses surveyed would describe the online experience they deliver as “very successful.” When it comes to digital experience, respondents were the first to admit there is room for improvement.

What’s going wrong to create this underperformance? Of the challenges business face when trying to improve online customer experience, the most commonly cited were a “lack of resources” and “organizational challenges.”

• Adoption and perception of tools: Businesses increasingly turn to evidence-based tools to improve their digital offerings. Ninety-six percent of the sample said they measure the customer experience in some way, and typically a range of qualitative and quantitative technology is deployed–chief among them, web analytics.

Yet, while quantitative web metrics might be most widely adopted, businesses ranked qualitative tools more highly for generating useful insights that will help to improve the customer experience. More than 90% of them agreed that the data they gather from customer experience analytics tools has created positive outcomes for their customers.

• Focus on the framework: To meet the challenges of the customer-centric market in which they now operate, businesses said they believe it’s essential to invest in internal frameworks and resources. Nearly 60% of the businesses surveyed said that improving internal processes should be their No. 1 priority for improving the customer experience.

Alongside this deeper focus on internal process is a growing appetite to further invest in customer experience analytics tools. Eighty-four percent said they would sustain or increase investment in these tools in the coming year.

To download a copy of the full report, click here. (Short registration required.)