IDC research shows that Customer experience (CX) is now the top strategic business priority among European companies.
82% of European business executives consider CX an “essential” business agenda priority across their entire organizations. IDC believes that by 2022, customer experience will be a $100+ billion market in Europe, making it one of the largest areas of investment.
Despite the focus and efforts on CX, there are still lots of security and data privacy issues. Marriott’s recent data breach of its Starwood guest reservation database exposed the personal information of up to 500 million people, impacting consumer trust and willingness to give consent to data utilization. Organizations that have engaged in bot-driven conversations with customers, are not really driving engagement, resulting in a sort of new IVR which does not add customer value. And lastly, customer journeys are fragmented and disconnected across the organization.
Organizations need to evolve their customer experience strategies, from personalization to delivering empathy where the focus is on constantly learning from customers. Moving from the lowest level of indifferent to impersonal to targeted to personalized to empathetic, through a progression that requires increasingly contextual information and more advanced technologies to transform data into actionable insights.
In the context of delivering empathy at scale, IDC research reveals that the three key aspects that will define the winners and losers in the customer experience market over the next five years are as follows:
- Customer consent: By 2020, to meet GDPR-type regulations and improve customer experience, 50% of global companies will integrate progressive consent opportunities into all stages of the customer journey.
- Customer conversations: By 2022, 30% of enterprises will use interactive conversational speech technologies to power customer engagement across marketing, sales, and service.
- Customer journeys: 90% of European organizations are investing in data and digital technologies for customer journey personalization
Those companies that crack these 3 imperatives will deliver customer delight and empathy at scale, which is the ultimate goal of every marketing and sales professional. The exciting news is that IDC now has a new CX Practice in Europe, providing insights from 20 analysts and consultants, each with a specialist industry sector or customer experience technology focus, to support both technology vendors and end-user organizations.
If you want to leverage the CX momentum and maintain a growth trajectory by learning more about the new IDC European CX Practice, visit the website at https://www.idc.com/eu/research/key-trends/customer-experience to contact us.