Research Shows CX Is ‘Top-5 Business Priority’ Yet Few Can Deliver

Integrated Relationship Management Is Essential for the Customer Experience Shoppers and Prospects Want, Yet Many Organizations Lack the Tools To Deliver

New research from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, sponsored by Salesforce, shows that customer experience (CX) is a top-five business priority. And yet, only 17% of survey respondents call themselves a CX leader.

Driving the news: Insight and engagement are two essential sides of CX. Knowing who customers are, how they behave, what they want, and why they want it is critical to providing a useful, usable, and enjoyable experience. 

Improving CX is part of many organizations’ strategic plans – 77% of respondents are investing in improving customer insight and 80% are investing in engagement. But, only 17% of respondents say their organizations are either excellent in both insight and engagement or excellent in one and good in the other. 

What’s the impact: Harley Manning, Vice President and Research Director at Boston-based Forrester Research, attributes great CX to three things: when customers perceive their interactions with your company to be useful (delivering value), usable (easy to find and engage with the value), and enjoyable (emotionally engaging). 

The new research shows that while companies value CX, they don’t yet have the tools to deliver.

By the numbers:

• 88% of U.S. Harvard Business Review Analytics Services survey respondents noted that a complete and consistent view of customers across all channels and platforms is very important to their future business success.
• 31% of survey respondents say they currently have a single, 360-degree view of customer data. And yet, half of them say they lack the organizational structure to make use of those insights.
• 60% of respondents said their organization lacked the tools to provide a single comprehensive customer view across sales, service, support channels, and platforms, though some had access to some consistent data.

Explore further: Read the full report.