Dive Brief:
- Over 50% of customer experience decision-makers believe their organizations lack the skills necessary to deliver on the user experience, according to a survey by Accenture Interactive and Forrester Consulting.
- About 93% of those surveyed said their companies are not exceeding consumer expectations for the user experience, with 25% saying they are not meeting expectations at all.
- The study identified the key traits of high performers with customer experience: They have adapted to constant change; they are data-driven; they have built strategic partnerships to help with skills and resources they need; their executive sponsorship for customer experience initiatives is fully aligned.
Dive Insight:
As advertisers and marketers struggle to deal with users increasingly adopting ad blocking technology, the solution may lie in improving the user experience. A poor user experience, along with the threat of ad fraud and malware, is one of the top reasons that consumers adopt ad blocking technology.
A recent survey of marketers and agency executives found that 73% of those surveyed believe that the user experience needs to improve in digital marketing. Ad clutter was cited as the biggest challenge of the digital advertising experience by 54% of those surveyed, followed by creative quality and the overall experience.
But the latest research from Accenture Interactive and Forrester Consulting shows that companies find it challenging to improve the customer experience—and their organizations may lack the skills to do so.
"Companies are complacent with incremental improvements in their customer experiences, while customer expectations are growing at a lightning pace. Customers’ expectations are driven by their best experiences — not their averages ones — yet brands think that they’re succeeding by being in the middle of the pack," the report found. "Enterprises lack many components of a CX strategy that will wow their customers."
Marketing is very much a customer-centric discipline and adding value to the customer experience should be a primary goal of any marketing activity.
"Loyalty, retention, cross-sells, and upsells will become the domain of marketing over the next four to five years, which indicates that marketing will play on a much bigger and broader stage strategically," Marketo CMO Sanjay Dholakia said in explaining the importance of the customer experience to Marketing Dive. "Marketing becomes essential to a much bigger transformation around the customer."