Employee Engagement Is a Top Concern Affecting Customer Experience

Employee engagement has surfaced as a major concern in delivering improvements in customer experience (CX), with 86 percent of CX executives in a Gartner survey ranking it as having an equal or greater impact than other factors such as project management and data skills.

The Gartner study was conducted in February and March 2018 with 209 respondents in the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Singapore, India, Canada and New Zealand. Respondents were from a wide range of industries and company sizes and heavily involved in a CX program, with 71 percent in a leadership position.

Organizations can consider undertaking hundreds of different potential CX improvement projects, but only a few can be funded. Survey respondents ranked personalization, voice of the customer (VoC), metrics and multichannel-related projects as the highest priority activities in 2018.

In terms of technologies, customer analytics is considered the most critical technology investment for CX improvement projects. Customer analytics covers a range of different possibilities, and organisations attach highest emphasis on customer journey, customer needs and digital marketing analytics when prioritizing investments.

However, the range of technologies being used remains broad, from mature technologies like business process management, VoC and user experience (UX) design tools and platforms to emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). Looking to the future, more than one-third of organizations are considering using virtual assistants to improve customer experience. This includes virtual customer assistants (VCAs), chatbots and virtual personal assistants (VPAs). Blockchain is being considered by 15 percent of organizations and 11 percent are considering AI.

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores remain the most commonly used metric (62 percent) followed by product/service quality metrics and employee engagement. Customer Effort Score is employed as a CX metric by nearly one-third of surveyed organizations and Net Promoter Score (NPS) by one-quarter of participants.  The survey also found that return on investment (ROI) has become a major focus for enterprises, with 93 percent measuring ROI on their CX improvement projects.