Also, 97 percent of executives who took the survey agreed that delivering a great customer experience is critical to business advantage and results. Nearly 93 percent of executives said that improving the customer experience is one of their organization’s top three priorities in the next two years, and 91 percent wish to be considered a customer experience leader in their industry. However, only 37 percent of organizations are getting started with a formal customer experience initiative and only 20 percent consider the state of their customer experience initiative to be advanced.
Further, 81 percent of executives agreed that delivering a great customer experience today requires leveraging social media effectively, yet 35 percent do not have social media for sales channels and 35 percent do not have social media for customer service. Executives cited limitations from inflexible technology, siloed organizations and systems, and insufficient investment as the biggest obstacles to delivering the best possible customer experience.
On average, businesses estimated that their spending on customer experience technology will increase by 18 percent in the next two years as improving the cross-channel experience and customer analytics have become top priorities.
Successful initiatives that have improved the customer experience span people, process and technology since a good customer experience strategy requires fundamental organizational changes. Executives at organizations that consider their customer experience initiatives as “advanced” appear to have been most successful in engaging their employees by building training programs and incentives for employees to offer a great experience, updating company core values to include customer experience and by implementing a specific technology to improve customer service.
