A new survey conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by Mapp Digital dwelves into the importance of using customer insights for CX improvements. The study notes that optimizing customer strategies was named the top priority for 2021 according to the 200+ global decision makers who were surveyed.
89% of the surveyed decision makers said that a good CX strategy is important or very important. But almost half of them admitted that they don’t regularly review their CX strategy, with 47% reviewing once a year or less, and only 1% reviewing weekly. Over half of companies are in the beginning stages of planning or implementing a CX strategy.
The issues attributed to collecting customer insights, such as lack of skills (57%) and lack of customer knowledge (54%) – or the analysis of collected data, such as isolating data silos (55%) or undefined measuring metrics (53%) – prevent timely advancement and establishing opportunities for automated improvements and optimization. The biggest challenge in updating the CX strategy was difficulty with tying business outcomes to real customer needs (83%), emphasizing the gap that exists between strategy and performance for many companies. Retail companies overall fared better in adopting new technologies and optimizing strategies with the data gathered.
The key recommendation from the report is that customer insights should be the main basis for improving CX strategy, as understanding and meeting customer needs is the best way to increase satisfaction. Customer expectations are constantly changing, and CX strategies must learn to flexibly adapt. Identifying and correctly implementing insight data should be used in helping predict and personalize experiences. Improving customer insights led to the best performance improvements for 51% of respondents. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are among the technology that can be successfully used to aid with effective customer analytics, which was stated as the best investment for customer understanding by 56%. Implementing similar platforms showed improvements in flexibility of strategic updates (62%), and in understanding customer intent (58%) and customer insights (57%).
