In today’s dynamic world, the best experience you have anywhere becomes your expectation everywhere.
Customer experience (CX) is vital to long-term growth, helping organizations win new business, build customer loyalty, and transform their product offerings.
We recently conducted a global customer experience survey of 1,000 executives across 10 different sectors and industries. Notably, 58 percent of surveyed C-suite leaders—CEOs, CFOs, COOs, CIOs, CMOs, CTOs, CXOs, and CDOs—placed customer experience and satisfaction in their top three priorities for growth through customer experience today.
In the midst of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, organizations have even more paths to enhance the customer experience. Since the explosion of large language models (LLMs) with the launch of ChatGPT less than two years ago, generative AI has enhanced the delivery of customer experience by accelerating customer service, simplifying logistics, and empowering personalization.
Generative AI tools are already fundamental to growth. Three-quarters of respondents thought both generative AI for chatbots and customer service, and generative AI for marketing transformation, were either important or extremely important to their growth transformation. From software development to content creation, this new technology has reshaped the CX toolkit, even though the full scale of the transformation has yet to unfold.
Expectations are through the roof: speed, responsiveness, correctness—all of those things. It’s hard to recover from somebody feeling like they had a bad experience with your site or store.
—David Oberst, Group Creative Director
For today’s C-suite, the real disruptor isn’t the competition—it’s the customer.
Corporate leaders are paying more attention than ever to what their customers want—and how to deliver it. Some have learned this the hard way: though competition remains a concern, it isn’t the only issue on C-suite leaders’ minds. In our report, more than a third of them found that rapidly changing customer expectations have been a significant challenge to their growth transformation.
But the C-suite was much more focused on the customer-facing elements of generative AI than on behind-the-scenes applications like logistics and software development.
A recent survey asked: What impact, if any, have the following challenges had on your organization’s growth transformation efforts in the past 12 months? (N=C-suite 250, V-suite 750)
When asked about their organization’s priorities for long-term growth through customer engagement (today and over the next three years), the C-suite identified:
The V-suite saw opportunities for generative AI across the board, while the C-suite focused on customer service, customer experience, and sales.
The V-suite saw opportunities for generative AI across the board; the C-suite were focused on customer service, customer experience, and sales. The C-suite will have to find ways to help practitioners see and realize the value of generative AI.
The C-suite will have to find ways to help practitioners see and realize the value of generative AI. Data is the key that unlocks success.
53% of companies need to have their data houses in order to get the most out of AI.
“Strategically, AI unlocks data in new ways—enabling broader scenario planning, connecting previously siloed assets, and transforming both our approach and the final solution.”
—Zach Paradis, Global Vice President of Customer Experience and Innovation
With the help of generative AI tools, creating the content required for personalization at scale becomes simpler, automatic, and in real time. There are millions of dollars in cost savings to be won.
“People talk about how great it would be to personalize, but the first roadblock is that clients don’t have the content to sustain personalization. Custom tools can help them create all those pieces.”
—Jackie Walker, Retail Experience Strategy Lead, North America
iResearch conducted an online survey among 1,000 business decision-makers between June and July of 2024 to create this customer experience benchmarking report. Respondents were drawn evenly from consumer products, energy & commodities, financial services, healthcare, retail, telecommunications, media & technology (TMT), transportation & mobility, and travel & hospitality. They worked for companies with an annual revenue between $1 billion and $10 billion, either at the C-suite level or at the VP level in strategy and innovation, customer experience, or data and analytics.
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