Howdy Folks 🤠

Last week, I broke the streak and didn’t write my newsletter 😩

My excuse? Vegas got the best of me … I’m sure it’s happened to the best of us.

Anyway - I’m back at it this week, and have decided to summarise CMSWire’s State of Digital Experience 2024 Report.

Check out the XX most interesting findings below 👇

The State Of Digital Experience 2024 Report, by CMSWire

This was the 9th annual report conducted by CMSWire. It included survey responses from over 1,100 digital customer experience executives, and aims to highlight trends / differences compared to 2021 & 2022.

I previously wrote about the 2023 results here, and will aim to call out similarities / differences where it’s appropriate to do so.

Trend #1 - There has been a significantly higher focus on reducing operating costs by delivering more effective digital experiences in 2023

The importance of digital customer experience (DCX) on reducing costs increased by 6% between 2022 to 2023. This demonstrates the renewed focus of organisations to offer self-service solutions which prevent customers from having to call the contact centre.

I believe that this trend has become increasingly important in 2023 (and likely into 2024) due to the macroeconomic pressures which are forcing organisations to figure out how they can do less with more, particularly within the call centre which is typically perceived as a cost centre to most organisations.

Trend #2 - Cross-department alignment & siloed systems still appear to be creating the most friction for digital customer experience teams

Whilst this trend hasn’t changed since last year, the alarming thing is that the issue has seemingly worsened.

Only 37% of respondents stated that cross-department alignment was a challenge in 2021 however this has now increased to 43% in 2023.

Similarly, siloed systems / technology was only an issue for 30% of respondents in 2021. This has now ballooned to 38% of respondents in 2023.

How to fix this … ?

At Hubspot, a unified customer experience team has been created to work across departments (CX, marketing, product, contact centre). This cross-functional team aims to break down departmental barriers and also tends to facilitate data sharing in a more meaningful way.

Trend #3 - Employees are demanding more collaboration & ideation tools

What really stood out to me in the below visual was the fact that the need for Ideation & Innovation platforms has increased from 36% in 2021 to 45% in 2023.

Sit back and ask yourself a question. What mechanism do your employees currently have to formally submit suggestions, ideas or innovations?

There is a wealth of knowledge currently sitting within teams who interact with your customers on a daily basis. It’s integral to figure out a way to extract & utilise that knowledge for the benefits of the organisation, and to your customers.

Need a solution? Check out Medallia Ideas …

Trend #4 - Only 23% of respondents say that their digital CX platforms & tools are “working well” 😳

Whilst this trend is on the rise (up from 13% in 2018), there is still a significant portion of leaders who desire to get more from their tech stack.

Trend #5 - CDPs and CXM platforms are the two emerging types of technology that Executives plan to invest in across the next 2 years

Firstly, apologies for the blurriness of the visual.

Second, here are my observations of the below visual:

• Over 92% of organisations will be using an email marketing tool and CRM by 2026.
  

• The top 5 emerging pieces of software that organisations plan to invest into across the next 2 years include:

  • Customer Data Platforms (CDPs): 41%

  • Customer Experience Management (CXM): 41%

  • Digital Experience Platform: 39%

  • Chatbots: 36%

  • Sentiment Analysis: 36%

Trend #5 - More sophisticated tools appear to be producing better results for customers

CMSWire compared the responses to the question about the different tools in operation from those who declare their overall DCX toolset as “working well” compared to those who said it “needed work.

They found a clear pattern which shows that those with a more effective CX techstack are tending to invest in more sophisticated and advanced tools such as DXPs, CDPs or journey orchestration software.

These results support the hypothesis that more sophisticated CX tools are generally producing more effective results.

Trend #6 - Customer journey analysis & optimisation continues to increase as an investment priority for Executives

There was a 9% increase in the number of respondents who stated that customer journey analysis is a key investment focus for 2023-4.

Currently, CX tools do a great job at analysing a single interaction however there still appears to be an opportunity for technology connect the dots across multiple interactions and non-linear journeys that customers are having across multiple channels.

The other significant investment priority for this year (compared to last year) will come as no surprise - AI & Machine Learning capabilities:

Trend #7 - CDPs appear to have been the big purchase item of 2023

When comparing survey results between 2022 and 2023, there was a 10% increase in the amount of respondents who claimed that they have already purchased a CDP, or customer data management solution.

This increase could either be due to Executives becoming more aware of what a CDP is, or it could be indicative of the increasing customer data maturity across organisations.

Whilst this is encouraging, a CDP is only as valuable as the action you take from it. Organisations should continue to focus on how they will ACTIVATE the data that is stored within a CDP:

Trend #8 - The level of customer personalisation stagnated in 2023

As per the figure below, the proportion of respondents currently conducting 1:1 personalisation remained at 6%. There were some green sprouts, with one:few personalisation increasingly slightly.

This trend demonstrates that organisations are still struggling to ACTIVATE the data that has neatly been stored in a CDP.

Trend #9 - The way that organisations think about measuring digital CX (DCX) appears to be evolving

Now I’m not entirely sure how to read into the below visual, as a lot of things have changed. In my opinion, it demonstrates that organisations are increasingly beginning to realise that metrics such as NPS & CSAT are only useful if they can be connected to some form of business outcome.

Whilst the proportion of organisations using NPS to measure the digital CX has increased (from 37% to 45%), it’s also encouraging to see the following metrics increase:

• Bookings, renewals and/or growth: from 28% to 37%

• Customer acquisition rate: from 24% to 32%

• Reduced customer service loads: from 16% to 22%

  • This metric interests me a lot as I am a firm believer that the ROI of a great digital experience will be felt the most within the contact centre. It is 81x more expensive to serve a customer in an assisted channel, versus allowing them to self-serve!

Trend #10 - AI is expected to make the largest impact in self-service & employee productivity

It is evident in the below visual that organisations have now seen the benefit of Generative AI in being able to free up staff to engage in higher-level tasks e.g. by curating content / emails.

Whilst there are a number of customer service use cases where AI can seemingly help to drive efficiencies, the largest step changes in the below visual actually relate to sales activities:

• There was an 8% increase in the number of respondents who felt AI could help drive more cross-sell & upsell opportunities
  

• There was an 11% increase in the number of respondents who felt AI could help in providing better product recommendations

Trend #11 - The current primary use case for AI in CX/marketing is content creation & generation

As AI is still in it’s infancy, it will be interesting to see these use cases evolve over the coming few years:

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