CX is becoming more and more important everyday. Source: Shutterstock

CX is becoming more and more important everyday. Source: Shutterstock

Gartner says companies are investing more in CX technology

FAILURE to provide a good customer experience (CX) can cause a lot of damage to businesses.

Although it seems as though organizations that deal directly with customers will lose out the most, the reality is that every kind of brand stands to lose a fortune if they don’t provide a good CX.

Business leaders understand this. As a result, they’re more inclined to invest in improving the CX they provide.

According to a new study by Gartner, 75 percent of organizations surveyed said they spent more money on technologies that could help improve their CX last year.

Customer analytics continues to be one of the biggest investments, with 52 percent of the survey’s 244 respondents in seven countries saying they intend to increase funding in 2019, focusing on customer journey analysis, customer needs analysis, voice of the customer (VoC), and digital marketing.

Further, the survey revealed that the top five CX project priorities in 2019 are

  1. Measuring improvements in customer experience (64 percent)
  2. Understanding the voice of the customer (50 percent)
  3. Increasing speed of product and service launches (45 percent)
  4. Product proliferation and personalization (45 percent), and
  5. Prioritization of CX investments (44 percent) and customer journey automation (44 percent)

Analysts from the market research firm will be sharing more insights about CX at the Gartner Customer Experience & Technologies Summit 2019 in Sydney today.

Technology can help improve your CX

The survey reveals that when organizations grow in CX maturity, a greater focus of technology investment is placed on increasing customer understanding and delivering accurate actions by analyzing data.

At the same time, CX programs expand from a core team to a wider group of employees. The requirement for change management makes employee training tools an important technology investment.

According to the survey, the top three emerging technologies expected to have the biggest impact on CX projects in the next three years include artificial intelligence (53 percent), virtual customer assistants and chatbots (39 percent) and omnichannel engagement solutions (37 percent).

Of these, virtual customer assistants and chatbots seem to be the most exciting at the moment given the ease of deployment and the immediate benefits it accrues to the organization — including round-the-cloud support for customers which is extremely important in today’s digital world.

“Extend your spending to different technologies as your CX maturity increases, paying particular attention to customer analytics investments,” advised Gartner Research VP Olive Huang.

Huang’s advice really bodes well with organizations expecting to use CX projects to understand customers and tailor the experiences they provide to them at the individual level.

Although this seems like a challenging project, experts believe that it can be incredibly rewarding for those that can strike the right balance between privacy and personalization.