- an increasing number of channels and devices on which customers want to engage
- increasing expectations for quick, consistent, correct, personalized (and sometimes proactive and predictive) engagement
- and most importantly, when thinking about digital transformation, increasing expectations for brands to create new products, services, experiences, and value.
What do most organizations say is the key to tackling these challenges? Becoming more data-driven. Here are 16 statistics that show its significance:
- 73% of business leaders say that delivering a relevant and reliable customer experience is critical to their company’s overall business performance today, and 93% agree that it will be 2 years from now. —HBR Closing the Customer Experience Gap Report
- Data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times as likely to retain customers, and 19 times as likely to be profitable as a result. —McKinsey Global Institute
- In a survey of approximately 700 business professionals, only 15% said their organization is currently very effective in delivering a relevant and reliable customer experience (53% say they are somewhat effective and 32% say they are not very effective). —HBR Closing the Customer Experience Gap Report
- In the same survey, only 3% of respondents said they are able to act on all of the customer data they collect; 21% say they can act on very little of it. —HBR Closing the Customer Experience Gap Report
- In an Econsultancy and Adobe survey of client-side marketers worldwide, respondents (65%) said improving data analysis capabilities to better understand customer experience requirements was the most important internal factor in delivering a great future customer experience. —Digital Intelligence Briefing: 2018 Digital Trends
- In a 2018 survey of US senior decision-makers by Verndale, big data and analytics was also listed as the most important emerging technology for enhancing the customer experience. —Verndale Customer Experience (CX) Journey Research
- In Dimension Data’s 2017 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report, customer analytics has been rated the number 2 factor in driving positive CX improvement over last 5 years. For the next 5 years, it’s voted number 1. —Dimension Data’s 2017 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report
- In the same survey, only 48% of respondents say their organizations currently have analytics systems, and only 36% possess big data analytic solutions. —Dimension Data’s 2017 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report
- 42% of respondents say that their analytic systems don’t meet current needs. —Dimension Data’s 2017 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report
- 92% of marketing professionals see personalization as a “crucial” element of CX, yet 51% say that their organization cannot deliver the personalization its customers crave. —Verndale Solving for CX Survey
- The top needs for improving customer experience personalization are more real-time insights (46%), gathering more customer data (40%), and greater analysis of customer data (38%). —Verndale Solving for CX Survey
- Marketers worldwide say their primary challenge in executing a data-driven customer experience strategy is a fragmented system to deliver a unified view of the customer experience across touchpoints (38%), followed by silos of customer data that remain inaccessible across the entire organization (30%). —CMO Council, Empowering the Data-Driven Customer Strategy
- Only 7% of marketers surveyed report that they are currently effectively able to deliver real-time, data-driven marketing engagements across both physical and digital touchpoints. —CMO Council, Empowering the Data-Driven Customer Strategy
- 63% of marketing professionals say that big data/analytics functionality would be critical to enhancing CX in their organization. —Verndale Solving for CX Survey
- Organizations see machine learning as a key factor in helping them process huge amounts of customer data (49%), provide real-time analysis (49%), and build more accurate pricing models (49%). —Verndale Solving for CX Survey
- In 2018, two-thirds of firms will create customer insight centers of excellence. —Forrester Predictions 2018: AI Hard Fact—Treat It Like a Plug-And-Play Panacea and Fail
As you can see from the majority of these statistics, most organizations are behind in effectively using data and analytics to enhance and improve the customer experience. So that means there’s time to both catch up—and get ahead. Organizations racing to get the customer experience right won’t be alone though, as seen from the 16th statistic. There’s no time like the present to start getting your customer experience data in order.