Data Analytics Drives Customer Experience

The State of Customer Experience Innovation, 2016: Customer Analytics Gets Critical

• Nick Ingelbrecht | Olive Huang | Julie Meyer
• 05 May 2016

Customer analytics has become the hottest technology investment area. IT leaders supporting customer experience must prioritize the right mix of investments for their organization, amid a huge and often bewildering array of alternatives.

Key Findings

• A global Gartner study of customer experience improvement projects shows the greatest impacts in 2015 were achieved through projects that addressed multichannel orchestration, self-service and creating a single view of the customer.
• Customer analytics has become the most critical technology investment for CX improvement.
• Eighty-eight percent of sample organizations plan to increase CX technology investment during 2016.
• Organizations are still not gaining any greater visibility of ROI on CX improvement projects. Metrics have become a priority – but measuring CX remains a challenge for many.

Recommendations

IT leaders supporting customer experience should:

• Assess and prioritize the CX improvement projects that are most critical to your own organizations' circumstances, challenges and potential business impact, working with formal CX leadership and/or cross-functional stakeholders. Focus on key projects – don't get distracted by the size and complexity of the CX challenge. CX is a continuous journey of improvement rather than a fixed destination.
• Re-examine your organization's customer analytics roadmap. Predictive and prescriptive analytics are key to turning customer insight into action, and lagging behind the adoption curve will leave your organization at a disadvantage.
• Use a mix of different metrics to measure different aspects of CX and turn the numbers into dollar values, where possible, in order to cement consensus across the organizational silos and demonstrate clear benefits to the business in terms everyone understands.

Strategic Planning Assumption

By 2018, 50% of agent interactions will be influenced by real-time analytics.

Survey Objective

Customer experience (CX) has become a top priority for CEOs, who are driving increasing investment into projects that improve the experience of customers interacting with their organization.