Improving Customer Experience Top Priority for Customer Engagement Investment

New study highlights the most important business objectives to invest in customer engagement technology.

Customer engagement has become one of the top focuses across companies globally, and InfoTrends has conducted research into the main reasoning behind this.

The study, titled "Customer Engagement Technologies State of the Market 2015", aims to gain more insight into the market of customer engagement, and to better understand how enterprises adapt these technologies for improving their customer relationships.

Questioning 800 North American and Western European enterprises within key verticals about their most important business objectives to invest in customer engagement technology, the research found that improving customer experience is the top reason for customer engagement investment for 37.1 per cent of those surveyed.

This was closely followed by increasing customer loyalty (36.3 per cent). Better understanding of customer behaviour (31.5 per cent), reducing customer churn (23.9 per cent) and increasing upsell/cross-sell (23.3 per cent), rounded out the top 5.

Reducing costs, regulatory/legal compliance and business user enablement have moved to the bottom of the list of priorities highlighted within the study.

The research also showed that the trend of marketing plays an increasingly dominant role in customer communications, which is causing a change within enterprises shifting their customer communications from an operational matter towards a strategic matter.

In a statement accompanying the findings, the market research and strategic consulting firm explained that the scope of traditional customer communications management is expanding, driven by technology innovations that enable enterprises to directly communicate with individual customers.

It concluded: "Therefore, enterprises need to start cultivating their customer relationships by engaging with their customers to maintain levels of customer satisfaction. Customer engagement is the new paradigm for customer communications."