What’s Driving Investments in Customer Experience?

In a recent post published in CX Journey, we called 2015 ‘The Year of Customer Experience.’ And we think this is a just attribution, considering:

• 95% of retailers surveyed by Boston Retail Partners identified customer experience as a top-three priority in 2015;
• 82% of brands perceive customer experience as a competitive differentiator, according to Deloitte; and,
• 18% of total marketing expense budgets were spent on the customer experience in 2014 – and Gartner predicts this number will only rise in 2015.

Even though the importance of investing in a strong customer experience is recognized almost across the board, reasons for doing so vary greatly.

Last month, Econsultancy teamed up with Adobe to study the leading focal points for customer experience investments in 2015 by surveying over 2,000 client-side marketers. They found the number one driving force of CX improvements is to make the experience “as personalized and relevant as possible” – which motivated investments for 33% of respondents. A focus on making the experience “as valuable as possible” came in a close second – driving 29% of investments. Other drivers included consistency, reliability, fulfillment, speed, and mobile performance:

Other CX-related findings of the 2015 Digital Trends Report show:

• 78% of those surveyed ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ that customer experience was a differentiator for their business.
• Customer experience was identified as the single most exciting opportunity for marketers, with 20% of respondents identifying it as the most exciting opportunity in 2015 (personalization came in second, at 16%).
• A cohesive long-term strategy was identified as the most important building block for building an exceptional customer experience, followed by a cross-team approach and skills combining digital marketing with analytics and technology.
• 44% of marketers identified customer experience/service as their primary differentiator over the next five years, followed by product/service quality (28%) and product/service choice (9%). Only 5% identified price as their leading differentiator.

Do these perceptions of customer experience match your own? Let us know how customer experience factors into your 5-year plan and what’s motivating you to provide an exceptional CX.