Customer experience priorities are changing

Published on the 11/06/2015 | Written by Newsdesk


customer experience

Organisations have changed their customer experience (CX) priorities for 2015, according to a recent survey by Gartner, Inc…

The top three CX projects planned for 2015 are self-service, multi-channel orchestration activities, and collecting and analysing customer feedback as companies seek to focus on improving cross-channel consistency. Honouring data privacy gets even less attention in 2015 than it did last year and standardising approaches to segmentation also continues to register low in the list of projects planned for 2015.

The survey took place in January 2015 among Gartner Research Circle Members, a panel composed of IT and business leaders. Respondents were responsible for CX projects, working on CX projects, or were familiar or indirectly impacted by such projects.
It found that organisations implemented an average of 5.7 CX projects during 2014, with the biggest focus on:

  • Programs to improve the collection and analysis of customer feedback and “opening up” the organisation
  • Reconfiguring customer process
  • Activating self-service and tools to select, order, track and stop product purchases.

Nick Inglebrecht, Perth-based research director at Gartner, said the findings underline the complexity of CX improvements. “There is no silver bullet that will, by itself, improve the overall experience. But the combination of projects, if implemented well, can cumulatively contribute to the improvement of an organisation’s customer experiences.”

More than one-third of survey participants said their customer experience improvement projects during 2014 involved significant changes of business models. The majority of business model changes mentioned involved amendments to processes surrounding the production of products and services, including supply chain and internal processes. In one-third of cases, the changes related to amendments to the way in which customers interact with the organisation.

“Not all business model changes are of equal significance, but there appears to be recognition among the more mature organisations that CX projects span organisational boundaries and fundamentally affect the way the organisation operates,” said Ingelbrecht. “As a result, Gartner predicts that by 2018, more than 50 percent of organisations will implement significant business model changes in their efforts to improve CX.”

The leading CX priorities for 2015 are projects aimed at improving consistency across channels and acting as a unified organisation. “There are perhaps signs of a realisation here that CX is more than just customer satisfaction (CSAT); you actually have to drive word-of-mouth recommendations and give your existing customers more reasons to keep coming back to you,” said Ingelbrecht.

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