The digital customer experience has redefined the way businesses and their customers interact. In its recent report Predicts 2016: CRM Customer Service and Support, Gartner brought customer relationship management and customer experience to the fore, highlighting that understanding customer intent, and balancing corporate goals with customer expectations is becoming increasingly important. Yet the reality is that many companies are still woefully far from delivering, or indeed fully understanding, the multi-touchpoint experience today’s customers now expect.
How to achieve this? For the first time, we’re introducing an independent Trends Report to identify and examine the top issues (2016 Trends Survey), including some more contentious ones, facing organisations with regards to customer-centricity in the digital age:
- Is there increasing pressure from your customers to deliver a more digital face to your service, such as providing services via social media?
- How important is a connected digital infrastructure in being able to service and anticipate your customer's needs?
- Does your current IT infrastructure limit your ability to respond quickly to customer's issues?
- Have you had problems in being able to quickly resolve customer's issues due to limitations with your current online service?
- Has social media enabled you to improve/innovate the way you interact with your customers?
- How many UK businesses, in your opinion, really are adopting digital technologies?
- Has the Government provided enough budget to realise its digital agenda?
What are the key areas of focus for organisations looking to develop their solution propositions and achieve true customer satisfaction? How should we best use digital technology to change our go-to-market strategy and create value? The results of the survey will show us whether British businesses understand what they need to do in order to become more agile and deliver the digital experiences that their customers expect and increasingly demand. After all, it’s those organisations who truly put their customers front and centre, creating operations that revolve around every aspect of the customer journey, who will compete most effectively and prosper amongst the disruption caused by digital.
This also supports Forrester’s Trends 2016: The Future of Customer Service, which highlighted the need to build operations in such a way that every communication should be designed so that it’s easy, efficient, and creates a satisfying interaction for the customer.
While digital has been around for some 30 years, we believe that the focus needs to shift to look at how it can give you agility to adapt in line with business change. We therefore aim to provide organisations with the right solutions to help them reimagine and adapt their business, processes and services, with confidence. The results of our Trends Report will give us new insight to help us further transform customers' experiences, driving their satisfaction and loyalty to achieve competitive advantage.
We hope you’ll take five minutes to have your say (2016 Trends Survey), by way of appreciation for giving up your time, we’ll donate £1 for every completed survey to our charity of choice – the Prince’s Trust. We look forward to receiving your replies…watch this space for the results!
Gordon Wilson, Chief Executive Officer, Advanced
