“New normal” influencing convenience, budget and ROI
Discover how the Covid-19 pandemic reshaped attitudes around key CX drivers
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CX Network’s Global State of Customer Experience 2022 report dissects the insights of 270 surveyed CX experts to paint a picture of how CX has developed across the globe over the last year and offer an understanding of where we are now.
In this article, we highlight three of the key findings presented in the report and discuss the year-on-year industry progression that they indicate, offering suggestions for why we are observing these results today.
Customers are less happy to spend on convenience
While 44 percent of customers are still happy to spend more for the sake of convenience, the importance of convenience appears to have dropped in the minds of customers over the last year.
In fact, we saw an eight percent decline on the figure reported in The Global State of Customer Experience 2021, when 52 percent of CX experts expressed the belief that customers are happy to spend more on convenience.
At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic convenience was king as customers searched for new solutions that tackled pandemic-related barriers on tasks or errands that were previously simple.
As such, it makes sense that we are now seeing a decline in the number of customers who are actively seeking convenience from brands. However, with brands constantly working to deliver on quality CX in ‘the new normal’, brands are still investing in convenience, despite it being less important to customers at present.
Organizations are offering new self-service channels or virtual assistants for example, but it is likely that we will see the number of customers seeking convenience decreasing even further.
Practitioners are getting better at demonstrating ROI
The biggest obstacle to investment in 2021, according to the surveyed CX experts, was the difficulty of adequately demonstrating ROI for CX initiatives. However, it does appear that CX practitioners are becoming much more adept at demonstrating ROI to senior stakeholders. The number of experts flagging this as the biggest obstacle to investment has dropped significantly, from 40 percent to 15 percent between 2021 and 2022.
In fact, demonstrating ROI is no longer the most commonly flagged issue with regard to CX investment and the biggest challenge on the minds of CX experts is now the difficulty of integration into existing tools.
One possible explanation for this, aside from the increasing proficiency of practitioners, is that senior stakeholders will be seeing increasing numbers of examples of successful implementation of expensive technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning for CX.
Related content: Upgrading CX: Getting the IT crowd on board
More brands have multi-million dollar CX budgets
With regard to the annual budget an organization is willing to allocate to CX projects, we have seen a huge increase between 2021 and 2022.
At the top end of the scale, only 11 percent of brands were willing to invest upward of US2.5mn in 2021, a figure which has almost doubled since then, rising to 19 percent in 2022.
Given that we have already seen above that demonstrating ROI is no longer nearly as significant a challenge as it was last year, the fact that brands are now spending more on CX should come as no surprise.
As CX practitioners become more skilled at demonstrating ROI and senior stakeholders become more receptive to the idea of implementing expensive technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning it is only natural that they will begin allocating larger budgets to CX to see these new, innovative ideas come to fruition.
