Providing a great customer experience is hard enough, but quantifying and measuring the results is another challenge altogether. As communicators know, mastering the latter task makes the former so much easier—yet according to new research from customer journey analytics software firm Pointillist, quantifying the ROI of these initiatives is the top CX challenge for the second consecutive year.
The firm’s newly released 2020 State of Customer Journey Management and CX Measurement report examines the opinions of CX, analytics, customer service and marketing professionals from various industries worldwide to discover what separates leaders in customer experience from laggards.
“Top performing organizations are succeeding today by using a data-driven, journey-based approach to measure and improve CX,” said Steve Offsey, VP of marketing at Pointillist, in a news release. “This year’s report provides a wealth of insights on CX management and measurement challenges, effective strategies for measuring and improving CX, and key capabilities that separate top performers from their peers. CX, analytics, customer care and marketing teams can use this information to benchmark their customer journey management maturity and lay out a strategy for improvement.”
High performers are aligned on a journey-based approach to CX:
Organizations struggle to connect customer behavior and journeys to business-critical KPIs, such as revenue, churn, cost to serve and more
Only 21 percent of respondents are very or extremely satisfied with their ability to quantify the impact of CX on business metrics. As a result, only 23 percent of under-performing CX teams had an increase in CX budget in 2020, compared to 50 percent of high performers. Those who struggle to quantify ROI are much less satisfied with their performance and the outcomes of their CX investments.
High performers are more likely to effectively integrate data, analyze behavior and engage customers across channels:
The survey found that data silos are still the primary barrier for effectively measuring and improving customer experiences. Cross-channel customer data is unified and fully accessible to drive CX initiatives in only 14 percent of enterprises. In addition, high-performing CX teams are 9.7 times more likely than under performers to connect behavioral data across three or more channels.
The survey confirmed that the majority of organizations (95 percent) collect Voice of Customer (VoC) data. However, 43 percent of organizations are not satisfied with their ability to quantify the impact of customer feedback and VoC data on business metrics. In fact, 60 percent of enterprise CX leaders agree that the number one challenge with VoC or other customer feedback data is that it is difficult to link it to tangible business outcomes, such as churn, lifetime value and revenue.
High performers are more effective at connecting customer behavior data across channels:
Finally, the survey confirmed that high performers take a more sophisticated approach when leveraging technology to improve CX and business results. High performers are 1.4 times as likely to leverage AI, as 88 percent of top performers have either already adopted AI or plan to within the next two years. The survey findings also suggest a growing maturity in the market overall, with as many organizations investing in customer journey analytics in 2020 (27 percent) as journey mapping (25 percent) and VoC (25 percent) solutions.
Quantifying customer experience ROI continues to be the #1 overall CX challenge:
Download the full report here.
Pointillist surveyed over 1,050 CX, analytics, customer service and marketing professionals from various industries worldwide.
