Forecasting Customer Experience Priorities in the Post-Pandemic Era
Thursday, December 9, 2021
Forecasting Customer Experience Priorities in the Post-Pandemic Era
We are in a new era for Customer Experience. Consumer expectations are heightened, the role of CX in B2B has reached an inflection point, direct-to-consumer investments are growing exponentially and the pace of digital transformation has reached unprecedented speed.
Download Rightpoint’s 2021 research report that assesses these changes and their implications for CX leaders.
Highlighted themes from the research:
CX is Key to the Company Vision: 63.2% of senior executives surveyed by Rightpoint said that customer experience was ‘extremely’ or ‘very important’ to their organization’s vision and goals in 2021. This indicates that most brands are doubling-down on the investment while nearly 40% are still reeling from negative impacts in 2020. This has major impact on who will be winning with customers in 2022.
E-commerce Has Reached a Strong-Hold: The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted consumers from offline to online faster and across more generations than ever before anticipated. With the ability to smoothly traverse channels and new common conveniences like buy-online, pick-up in store, e-commerce strength is here to stay.
Brands Must Resolve Customer Pain Points: Digital volume exposed pain-points in the customer journey and across service touchpoints that previously weren’t at critical mass to garner attention. Now CX leaders are acutely aware of pain points and dedicated to fixing all of them, as it only takes one bad experience to lose a customer.
Customer Data is its Own Initiative: With unprecedented digital interaction volume amidst existing data regulations, an intentional data strategy for collection, management and usage of data has to be top of mind. CX leaders are embedding data considerations into all initiatives, with a keen focus on qual and quant data for insights and customer activation, as well as for measurement and investment decisions.
Digital Experiences requires a Suite of Solutions: After the focus on spinning up or scaling e-commerce in 2021, it makes sense that executives are shifting focus to optimizing content and engagement strategies in 2021 and beyond. Investments in content and digital asset management systems (CMS, DAM), personalization tools, recommendation engines, journey orchestrators, and marketing automation platforms has boomed in 2021 and is expected to grow further in 2022.
The CXO/CCO is the Cross-Functional Leader: The CMO and CTO are also no longer the only advocates for CX. Many brands are investing in dedicated executive roles that lead initiatives across business functions: The Chief Customer Officer, according to 28.2% of all executive respondents, and the Chief Experience Officer, according to 23.1%.
For a deeper dive, check out these five exclusive pieces that expand upon our initial findings:
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