Gerry Brown
Gerry Brown (CX Research Director)

On December 6, 2018, IDC launched its European FutureScape for 2019 via a live webcast. IDC analysts talked through key predictions that will shape the European IT market to 2022. This blog post is a synopsis of the new IDC European Customer Experience (CX) practice’s contribution:

 

 

Why CX will become the new enterprise competitive differentiator that creates a $47 billion market in Europe by 2022.

The market opportunity for CX is truly huge. European CX software spend will increase from $34 billion in 2018 to $47 billion in 2022, and including IT services, CX spend in Europe will grow to well over $100 billion. Wow — these are big numbers. And it’s not just IDC saying this. SAP reckons the CX market was more valuable in 2018 than its traditional ERP, analytics and IoT, and procurement markets combined! Little wonder that 11 of the top 14 fastest growing technology vendors in Europe have some “skin” in the CX software market, with Salesforce and Adobe leading as dedicated super high-growth CX vendors.

 

CX is not just for customers

Customer experience is now central to both corporate business strategies and digital transformation initiatives. Future CX market growth is fueled by omni-experience, which means not only the experience of end customers, but also your back-office and front office staff, your business partners, and your wider ecosystem and stakeholders. Across these communities the “3 Cs” of Consent, Conversations, and Customer Journeys will embody the next generation of customer experiences.

 

Customer consent is the platform for compliance

Consent is required by GDPR and makes customer opt-in to marketing promotions a compliance minimum. Digital trust will become the platform for CX, especially for Millennials, and secure data privacy will be pivotal to fulfilling the modern brand promise to be good to both society and the environment. Customer data security and brand trust will become intimately and inherently interconnected. Hence customer consent databases will become embedded and foundational to CX applications software platforms by 2022.

 

Quality customer engagements will depend on conversational customer journeys

Once customer consent is verified, enterprises will switch their attention to orchestrating personalized two-way interactive conversations with their customers. Customer journey management software will play a vital role here, triggering the release of relevant content at the right time to the customer’s own preferred “opti (optimum)-channel” of choice, to facilitate a smooth transition to the next stage of the buying or servicing process. Better orchestrated and integrated customer journey software will result in more informed, seamless, and enjoyable experiences for consumers, reducing buying cycle times and increasing conversion rates while providing continuity of customer experience.

 

AI will enable ‘personalisation at scale’

AI will play a crucial role in GDPR compliance, and also in feeding contextually relevant customer data and content to human agents and chatbots to facilitate seamless end-to-end customer journeys and commerce. AI can deliver “personalization at scale” — the mythical “segment of one” talked about by marketers since the pioneering writings of Ogilvy and Kotler in the 1960s and 1970s. These bastions of the marketing profession would be shocked to discover that chatbots using advanced intelligent speech technologies for Amazon Alexa-like interactions, will be consumers’ primary channel of choice, however.

 

In summary…

We at IDC believe that by 2022, 50% of European organizations will have deployed customer consent database platforms to underpin customer journey management software, and AI deployment across these processes will deliver secure and even immersive and enjoyable customer experiences in one in four cases.

If you want to learn more about this topic or have any questions, please contact Gerry Brown or head over to https://idc.com/eu/predictions and drop your details in the form on the top right.

 

IDC-Predictions-2019

Prepare for the future of IT with IDC’s European Predictions — our top predictions highlight the outlook in the technology industry for the next three years. Download IDC’s European Predictions 2019 eBook.

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