Budgets for customer experience projects grow, but more are stalling

Over half of the organisations that participated in a recent Gartner survey said they planned to increase their customer experience (CX) budgets to support analytics.

However, for those with lower maturity levels in terms of customer experience, 60% admitted that their CX initiatives had stalled due to lack of executive support, and 59% found it difficult to demonstrate value or return on investment, leading to the chief financial officer in their organisations questioning future investments.

Gartner found that the main data analysis work businesses were focusing on included customer journey analysis, customer needs analysis, voice of the customer (VoC) and digital marketing.

The survey of 244 respondents in seven countries in North America, Western Europe and Asia-Pacific found that when organisations grow in CX maturity, a greater focus of technology investment is placed on increasing customer understanding and delivering accurate actions by analysing data.

Gartner’s survey also found that the size of the team involved in customer experience also grew, expanding from a core team to a wider group of employees. The requirement for change management makes employee training tools an important technology investment.

The survey found that the top CX project priorities in 2019 were metrics (64%), VoC (50%), increasing speed of product and service launches (45%), product proliferation and personalisation (45%), prioritisation of CX investments (44%) and customer journey automation (44%).

The top emerging technologies expected to have the biggest impact on CX projects in the next three years included artificial intelligence (53%), virtual customer assistants and chatbots (39%) and omni-channel engagement (37%), according to Gartner’s findings.

Olive Huang, research vice-president at Gartner, said: “Knowing where your strengths and challenges lie and the next steps needed to improve maturity will help with project prioritisation and planning.”

Huang urged customer experience leaders to secure management buy-in and consider deploying technologies that support change management programmes.