Sep 08 | 3 minutes read

5 Puzzling Customer Experience Statistics

– one of the big, standout findings from our latest piece of research looking at brand attitudes to CX.
 
The survey covers four distinct elements that, if conquered, will help you on your way to CX success. Yet despite this being high on marketers’ to do lists, the report is riddled with unexpected statistics that suggest success could be a long way off for many…
 
Get the basics right
 
A life lesson applicable to most disciplines indeed, but what exactly are the basics? As an initiative, or strategic goal, customer experience spans multiple channels, departments, technologies across the entire business… and this is before you even consider who your customer is! After all, the customer doesn’t care about your departments, as long as you deliver what they want and when.
 
That said, the report actually found that that the single biggest barrier to creating a single customer view is organisational structure.
 
Leadership and teamwork are imperative in getting the basics right, to drive the cultural attitudes and change needed to collaborate and succeed. Technology and budget will help to drive the strategy and enable collaboration, but ultimately the people and structure will determine the success. All these underpin a customer strategy – something a large number of respondents admitted to not even having…
 
Standout statistic: 41% of marketers do not have a strategy in place to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
 
Create the environment for CX to flourish
 
A recurring theme throughout the report is the disseminated nature of stakeholders, roles and responsibilities where CX is concerned, and the subsequent requirement for ongoing collaboration and sharing of information.
 
The difficulty in achieving a single customer view across an organisation is well documented, but the statistic below suggests it is the less customer facing departments – Finance, IT, R&D – that are unwilling to relinquish data so readily.
 
Standout statistic: 50% of customer facing department members found it either ‘complicated’ or ‘very hard’ to access potentially useful information from non customer facing counterparts.
 
Understand your customer
 
Personalisation gives brands the ability to speak to any customer on a level that pertains to their interests and behaviour and, when used properly, can prove a very real competitive advantage. If communication can be so readily tailored based on the person, their actions or timeframes between them, why would any brand ever send a generic message?
 
Yet despite this reasonable question, it seems personalised messaging still isn’t commonplace for many marketers out there.
 
Standout statistic: 74% of businesses admitted to not always delivering data driven, personalised communications to their customers.
 
Deliver the right experience at the right time
 
The three elements above will go a long way to setting this up, but the actual delivery will still hinge on all stakeholders taking responsibility, and the organisation as a whole collaborating and sharing data and insights with a view to acting on them appropriately and unanimously.
 
Even with all these boxes ticked, how do you know if you are delivering a solid customer experience? According to this report, almost half of companies surveyed… don’t know! And the simple reason for this is that they don’t measure it.
 
Standout statistic: 48% of businesses do not measure customer experience.
 
 
 
Despite Customer Experience being seen as the best opportunity for brands to carve out a competitive advantage, it seems most still have a way to go.
 
Download the full report: Customer Experience The Next Strategic Business Imperative to see all responses and insights.
 
This post was written by Martin Wallace