Customer experience is becoming critical and needs revamped

Organizations need to rethink traditional approaches to customer experience management according to a new study sponsored by Axway in partnership with industry analyst firm IDC. The study, The Role of Customer Experience Networks in Delivering Value-Based Digital Transformation, found that despite customer experience being the top digital initiative for organizations, 69 percent have yet to implement a single view of the customer.

The study surveyed more than 600 senior executives in IT, digital and customer experience roles at global enterprises across the U.S., Europe and Asia. The study revealed that customer experience is now the most critical digital initiative for more than 70 percent of enterprises. The study also indicated that customer experience is now replacing product and price as a means to create brand value, distinctiveness and strategic differentiation.

Despite organizations investing in omnichannel strategies, the study found that an omnichannel approach isn’t consistently delivering ROI. Only 14 percent consider the value of omnichannel to be ‘a key differentiator and source of competitive advantage’ conversely, 22 percent say it is just a ‘necessary cost of doing business’.

With traditional approaches to customer experience proving to be sub-optimal, IDC and Axway have identified a new approach to meet customer needs - customer experience networks. Leveraging data from a vast array of internal and external data sources in a customer’s journey - including customers, employees, business partners and suppliers - allows organizations to co-innovate with customers and embrace stakeholders in a more strategic and coherent way than omnichannel. The study revealed that traditional internally facing approaches and methods are being replaced by externally facing customer-centric methods, with more than half (52 percent) of enterprises moving very strongly towards ‘collaborative innovation’. Additionally, organizations operating customer experience networks are reporting increased revenue (68 percent).

Driving collaboration and innovation is APIs, of which 73 percent consider being ‘important’ or ‘extremely important’ for the implementation of customer experience networks. In particular, senior executives in industries including financial services, telecommunications and media, and utilities verticals consider APIs to be top priority, with 80 percent of them indicating that APIs are ‘important’ or ‘extremely important’.

“Traditional approaches to customer experience are broken and as our research shows, organizations need to rethink their strategy for competitively achieving digital transformation,” said Jean-Marc Lazzari, CEO at Axway. “For businesses, a customer experience network generates incredible speed, power and agility. They tap into internal business and IT teams, developers, suppliers and partners to initiate new ideas and create a crystal-clear view of the customer.”