Of the latest CX initiatives, research firm Gartner says “Organisations can consider undertaking hundreds of different potential CX improvement projects, but only a few can be funded.”
So which CX initiatives are worth the investment?
According to responses to its survey of 209 CX executives in the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Singapore, India, Canada and New Zealand, the top CX projects for funding are personalisation, voice of the customer (VoC), metrics and omnichannel-related projects.
In a separate study, Gartner found 90 percent of brands practiced at least one form of marketing personalisation, but Gartner said: “content will be the bottleneck and cause of failure by 2020.”
And in terms of technologies, customer analytics was considered the most critical technology investment for CX improvement projects.
Customer analytics, Gartner said, “Covers a range of different possibilities, and organisations attach highest emphasis to customer journey, customer needs and digital marketing analytics when prioritising investments.”
Commenting on the findings of the CX executive survey, however, Olive Huang, Research Vice President at Gartner, cautioned that none of these initiatives constituted a ‘CX silver bullet.’
“You need to prioritise investments based on RoI, and benchmark and measure customer experience improvements over time.”
Measuring your CX improvements
Huang said one of the more surprising results of the survey was the increasing use of newer types of CX metrics such as Customer Effort Score.
Customer Satisfaction Score was the most commonly used metric, by 62 percent of respondents, but Customer Effort Score was used by almost a third of surveyed organisations, ahead of Net Promoter Score (25 percent).
Huang said this focus on measurement confirmed that CX was becoming “a cross-organisational, board-level priority.”
Another Gartner study found a big rise in the use of marketing analytics. Gartner surveyed over 500 companies for its 2018 Marketing Analytics Survey and said average analytics team size had grown from a couple of people a few years ago to 45 full-time employees (FTEs).
Almost 50 percent of respondents to the CX executive survey indicated they had financial metrics in place to measure return on their CX investment, as opposed to nonfinancial or informal metrics, and 62 percent said they had received the expected RoI from their recent CX initiatives.
“The realised RoI ranges from benefits for customers (such as increased customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy) to benefits for the organisation (such as increased revenue, customer lifetime value, customer retention and profitability),” Gartner said.
Whatever the initiative, support it with exceptional customer interactions
No matter which CX initiative you choose to implement, be sure to support the investment with exceptional customer interactions, every time. Our cloud-based contact centre platform, Premier Contact Point, can provide you with all the tools to make your customers’ interactions with your business effortless and rewarding. Contact us today to find out how.
