How Can Marketing Leaders Improve their CX in the Future? [Backed by Research]

Today, being able to deliver an excellent customer experience (CX) is what determines the success of an organization. As consumers’ demands, needs and wants have changed drastically over these last few years, businesses need to be even more meticulous with how they support their potential and existing customers and reconsider their priorities.

Offering personalized products and services coupled with tailored experiences to each single person is key to succeed in this competitive market. And If you fail to support your customers when they need you the most, they’ll leave you for better options.

To better understand the current state of CX, we asked 230 business and marketing professionals to rate the success of their CX efforts and share the most important initiatives they’re implementing to improve their CX in the future.

How do organizations rate their ability to deliver seamless CX?

When we asked our participants to rate their business’s ability to deliver high quality customer experiences, the majority (56%) claimed it was “very good” and 38% rated it as “good”. Only 5% said they were unsure and 1% of the respondents claimed that it was bad.

These numbers show a divide between exceptional and simply ‘good’ customer experiences, and looking at the data further reveals some key obstacles. 60% admit that managing, understanding and organizing data is one of their top challenges. Furthermore, 40% of respondents believe that the lack of consolidated data and analytics is what stops them from delivering great CX. A further 31% of senior managers haven’t explored customer data platforms, preferring instead to focus their attention on issues like relationships marketing and web design.

We also asked our participants what issues were stopping them from delivering high quality experience in relation to their CX rating. Only 26% of respondents who rated their CX as “very good” struggle with a lack of consolidated data and analytics, compared to almost half (48%) who rated it as “good”.

What’s more, those in the “very good” category cited customer satisfaction metrics not being shared across different departments (49%) and a lack of commitment from different departments (47%) as key obstacles, suggesting that the oft-cited challenge of departmental silos and cross-departmental collaboration are still holding businesses back.

Similarly, those in the “good” category cited lack of integration between tools and tech (52%) and siloed customer satisfaction metrics (52%) as the key issues stopping them from providing high-quality experience.

Learn more: How Marketing Silos Jeopardize Your Team’s Efforts (and How to Avoid Them)

What initiatives are organizations planning to implement to improve their CX in the future?

Around half of business leaders intend to invest in relationship marketing (51%) and customer journey mapping (48%) to improve their CX, while 31% are planning to use a customer data platform to better collect and organize data across different touchpoints. A further 42% of respondents will implement customer-centricity initiatives to better understand customers and 33% are willing to introduce real-time personalization to tailor products, services and experience to individual customers. Finally, 43% of respondents want to invest in website redesign and updates to enhance their user experience, ease of use and navigation.

Access The State of Customer Experience Research Report

For more detailed insights into the current state of CX, including the top challenges businesses are currently facing with their CX efforts and the initiatives they’re willing to implement in the future to improve service and agents performance, download the full report here.