Spending on customer experience (CX) technologies will increase 7.9 percent to $508 billion in 2019, according to the latest IDC report.
CX spending will achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.2 percent over the 2018-2022 forecast period, reaching $641 billion in 2022.
IDC defines customer experience as a functional activity encompassing business processes, strategies, technologies, and services that companies use, irrespective of industry, to provide a better experience for their customer.
CX spending will be distributed evenly across the 16 use cases identified by IDC. The top six use cases will account for less than one third of overall spending this year. The CX use case that will see the most spending in 2019 and throughout the forecast is customer care and support followed by order fulfillment and interaction management.
The retail industry will spend $56.7 billion on CX technologies in 2019. Retail organizations will be spending on digital marketing, AI-driven engagement, and order fulfillment.
Discrete manufacturing and banking, which will be the second and third largest industries in 2019, will be spending on customer care and support.
Services will be the largest area of CX spending at $220 billion in 2019. Most of this total will be divided between business services and IT services.
Software will be the second largest area of CX technology spending led by CRM applications and content applications.
Hardware, including infrastructure and devices, will account for nearly 20 percent of overall CX spending while telecommunications services will be less than 10 percent of total spending.
