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What’s Everyone Talking About in Customer Experience Today?
Customer experience is pretty much the hottest topic in the contact center and customer care space these days. We’ve been focused on designing and delivering best-in-class experiences for decades, but customer experience is an expansive, evolving topic, and staying current on trends and the latest thinking in customer experience is always a challenge. In this post, we’ve done some of the legwork for you and cherrypicked a handful of recent articles on the topic that we think readers will find useful and illuminating.
Where Are Businesses Spending Money on Customer Experience?
34% of small-to-mid-sized businesses are expected to spend more on customer experience technology in the next year, but just where those dollars are going requires some digging.
Interestingly, while the biggest investments have most recently been in programs that drive product adoption, develop brand advocates, and simplify processes, many CCOs indicate that their CX priorities look very different—and spending has yet to catch up with those priorities.
This article looks into where those priorities are, particularly as customer behavior have been permanently shifted by the pandemic.
The Amazonizing of Customer Experience
Who hasn’t purchased something via Amazon in recent years (or, you know, days…)? Because Amazon is such an industry monolith, it’s incredibly rare to find consumers who aren’t familiar with the Amazon standard of customer experience. As such, it’s not uncommon to see customers comparing other brands—even B2B brands—against the giant.
It might be unfair to compare businesses who are either much smaller or in a very different industry to Amazon, but that’s simply the reality of customer expectations. This article asks some thought-provoking questions about what that means for businesses everywhere.
The Growing Value of the Customer Experience Market
Between 2021 and 2028, the global customer experience management market size is expected to grow from $8.79 billion to $27.12 billion—an annual growth rate of 17.5%. This report gives a deep dive into the revenue share of each segment of customer experience.
In particular, we were interested to see that in 2020, text analytics accounted for 41% revenue share. This indicates how much companies are seeking unbiased insight into customer sentiment across comments, reviews, feedback, and more.
Finally, contact centers represented 31% revenue share in 2020, highlighting the trust companies are placing in contact centers as a source of customer experience expertise.
The Rise of Private Messaging Channels
As a company specializing in private messaging, they may be a little biased—yet they have some intriguing statistics that should be on the radar of any business building their customer experience strategy. In particular, this report found that 69% of customers engaged with brands via private messaging channels in 2020, while 40% of brands believe that these channels will be the biggest disruptor of customer experience for the foreseeable future.
The Monster Task of Measuring Customer Experience
There are a multitude of metrics that claim to measure customer experience, but it seems that no single number can truly capture the big picture. As such, this article dives into the nuances, stating that it takes on average 2.7 different methods to accurately measure customer experience. The large majority of B2B companies use surveys, while B2C conducts user interviews. But metrics like NPS, CSAT, and others also help to paint the picture.
The article also takes a look at the goals of customer experience optimization—from customer retention to customer lifetime value, there’s some insightful info here.
Data: The Backbone of Customer Experience
As the previous article hinted at, the topic of customer experience often comes down to how it’s measured. And that takes data. This article takes a deep dive into how to leverage data analytics to improve the customer experience. From setting the baseline in a testing environment, to cross-referencing past data, to tracking real-time data, understanding a customer “electronic body language” in terms of data is key to true success.
What does customer experience mean for your business right now? How has customer behavior changed in your sector over the last year?
