The Global State of Customer Experience 2017 – A Snapshot

With The Global State of Customer Experience 2016 being the most popular of CX Network’s reports last year, they’ve conducted their in-depth research for the second year running through a comprehensive annual survey for The Global State of Customer Experience 2017.

For this year’s edition they had nearly 800 responses, each of the participants providing insights into the trends, challenges, investment priorities that will be shaping CX in the upcoming year, in addition to sharing their expertise on where organisations are when it comes to hot topics within the industry, such as channel integration and digital transformation.

Top Customer Experience Trends 2017

The top three predicted trends from the practitioner side have, interestingly, remained the same compared to last year. Long-term trend customer loyalty and retention still reigns at the top, closely followed by digital and data analytics. Channel integration is a new entry to the top five, with CRM having dropped off entirely.

The vendors surveyed for this year’s trends unsurprisingly have tech front of mind when it comes to their top predictions, with buzzwords AI and chatbots making an emergence in their answers; an entirely new entry into the lists compared to the 2016 results.

Top Customer Experience Challenges 2017

This year’s top challenges for customer experience leaders sees little change from the 12 months prior, with building a customer-first culture still topping the lists. Linking customer experience initiatives to ROI is a new entry to the top five, consistently appearing in the second spot across all prediction lists.

Last year this only made the list of predictions from the solution providers so it’ll be interesting to see if any of the other challenges cited by them this year – such as customer data management and recruitment – will also come to pass in the next 12 months.

Top Customer Experience Investment Challenges 2017

In the 2016 research there was an alignment between the predicted industry trends and where CX leaders were focusing their investments, so it’s interesting to see that while customer loyalty and retention is still the top trend, more investments are actually going towards customer journey mapping this year.

This highlights how many of the predicted trends link into one another. After all, a successful customer journey mapping strategy is build by utilising data and analytics effectively (the third investment priority in this year’s top ten) and will – ultimately – lead to a higher retention rate as customers are more satisfied with the experience they receive as a result of good journey mapping practice.

Learn more

Are you interested in discover more about The Global State of Customer Experience 2017? Download your complimentary report for:

• Insight and expertise from Forrester, Facebook, Boohoo, EE, Aegon and more
• An in-depth look at the top trends, challenges and investment priorities for the next 12-18 months
• Why CX is at the heart of digital transformation
• Where organisations are on their channel integration journeys
• The leaders within customer experience today
• And much more