🥁 2023 Digital Customer Experience (DCX) Survey Results ...

Hi CEXy people!

My real name is Ben but you can call me Postman Pat 📫

Why?

Because I am about to deliver you another 🔥 report! All I ask for in return is that you share this around with your friends 🙏

This week, I’ve shared the top 10 insights from CMSWire’s State Of The Digital Customer Experience Report 2023.

The report claims to have surveyed 1200+ Executives however when reading the fine print, it appears that most of the insights are calculated from 936 respondents who “lead customer experience in their organisation, manage parts of the process, or have some kind of influence over it.”

Digital Customer Experience (DCX) Trends - 2023 Edition

In this year’s survey, only 2% of respondents declared Digital Customer Experience (DCX) to be unimportant to their business. The Digital train has arrived - hop on, or fall behind 🚝

Trend 1: Digital Customer Experience is no longer a sole function of marketing / top of funnel teams

• As per the below visual, there is an equally weighted focus on customer retention as well

Trend 2: Collaboration & Cross-Functional alignment is the largest challenge that CX & DCX teams currently face

• It’s quite common for different areas of a business to be protective (or to see no value) in sharing their data & insights. For example, it’s not uncommon for contact centre & digital / marketing teams to have little to no visibility of insights they’re obtaining from customers.
  

• The above trend, in conjunction with the fact that most organisations have a disjointed tech stack, will often lead to limited omnichannel insight. Limited connectedness of data is a key limiting factor to the facilitation personalised & orchestrated customer journeys.

Trend 3: >60% of Marketing & CX teams are not formally aligned

• This misalignment obviously leads to lower collaboration but also has a flow on effect to the siloed nature of systems & fragmented customer datasets.
  

• Without joint KPIs, it is likely that Digital & Marketing teams will be focusing on different things to CX & Retention teams. This prevents organisations to truly build an omnichannel view of the customer journey.

Trend 4: CSAT & NPS still remain king 👑 

• An interesting trend in the second visual below is that call center load reductions has increased as a metric to measure digital CX improvement from 9% in 2021 to 14% in 2022. The concept of digital containment / contact deflection is a 🔥 topic right now, particularly as contact centres are looking to reduce operational costs as much as possible.

Trend 5: CXM & DXP platforms are coming in 🔥

• Customer Experience Management (CXM) Software - a platform that can listen, analyse and act on customer signals across all customer touch-points. For example, Medallia.
  

• Digital Experience Platform (DXP) - Gartner’s definition is “an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery and optimisations of contextualised digital experiences”. In plain English, it is a tool that allows you to produce context-driven, personalised experiences for customers on digital channels. Medallia Experience Orchestration (MXO) has these capabilities (and more!).

Trend 6: Organisations are starting to realise that AI won’t solve all of their problems. People & Data Connectedness are the two largest investment priorities

• AI / Machine Learning capabilities decreased by 5% (from 30% to 25%).

• Journey Analysis & Customer Analytics has increased in popularity. Reading between the lines here, I still feel like organisations are too hung up on analysis and should be more focused on action at scale. We are data rich, but action poor …

Trend 7: Organisations are slowly starting to realise that CDPs offer no value if you’re not going to do anything with the data! Without action, CDP is just another glorified database …

Trend 8: CX is finally getting some respect put on it’s name! Awesome to see technology investments relating to CX increasingly sitting with the C-Suite 🎉

Trend 9: Whilst Personalisation is considered to be extremely important by customers, most organisations are still offering limited personalisation

Trend 10: Personalisation isn’t happening because orgs can’t figure out how to stitch customer datasets together!

• As per the below visual, it appears that a lot of organisations are focusing on creating a connected customer view before they orchestrate personalised experiences

Conclusion: 3 Key Takeaways

1. People - departmental siloes need to be fixed. Insights & data needs to be available to all teams responsible for the customer experience.
   

2. Systems - customer data sits amongst many different platforms within the business. Before you can begin orchestrating personalised journeys, customer data must be stitched together.
   

3. Data Rich, Action Poor - we love to collect data, but we don’t seem to do too much with this data. Customers are going to become more sensitive about the information they share with you if they don’t see an ROI on the provision of this information.

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