Three customer spending trends to watch

Uncover three key insights revealed in CX Network’s Buyers’ Guide to Smart CX Investments

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Adam Jeffs

In order to ensure that CX efforts are not wasted brands will need to understand where it is best to direct CX investment to attain sufficient return on investment (ROI). With this in mind, CX Network published A Buyers’ Guide To Smart Customer Experience Investments, which leverages expert opinions from surveyed respondents to advise practitioners on where to direct CX spending.

About the respondents:

Below we have summarized three key takeaways from the guide which include investment trends worth keeping an eye on and an example of demonstrating CX ROI in less than 10 months.

EMEA brands are spending big on digital CX

CX Network’s Buyers’ Guide to Smart CX Investments revealed that one of the largest areas of investment for EMEA brands is in digital customer experiences. This is somewhat unsurprising as the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing disruption that it has caused has been an excellent driver for the adoption of digital CX initiatives and the understanding of their importance.

In the report André Grandt, customer experience chapter lead and transformation officer at Roche, commented on the level of digital CX investment and offered his own advice for practitioners looking to implement it. Grandt believes that customer-centricity is the key here:

“Stay as close to your customers as you can. The needs of your customers are your destination and your customers are the pilots of the transportation. Get to know your pilots the best you can and they will take you to where you need to go. They can also tell you shortcuts as well,” he explained.

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ROI can be achieved in less than 12 months

Delivering and proving ROI for CX initiatives, presents a major challenge for any CX practitioner, due to the somewhat intangible nature of measuring experiences. This was not the case for one of the world’s leading food delivery companies, however, which managed to demonstrate the ROI of CX efforts in less than 12 months.

The business sought the implementation of a cloud-based, scalable, contact center solution that could connect regional providers, partners and the local infrastructure. Through an ROI analysis, an efficiency gains benefit of €870,000 (USD 987,532) was identified along with potential savings of €1.5mn under the new contact center model.

By optimizing call quality and routing processes, the business has now been able to achieve a 15 percent reduction in average call handling time and a 25 percent reduction in transferred calls, less than a year on from the implementation of the new contact center model.

Brands are more confident in CX management platforms

Customer experience management (CEM) platforms offer a centralized platform for brands to manage customer interactions and map out customer journeys across their entire business. Research conducted for the CX Network Buyers’ Guide found that brands are showing confidence in the longevity of such platforms as they have garnered the longest investment timescale of all the CX solutions that were assessed.

With long-term investments it is important that brands look to outsource the delivery and maintenance of a CEM platform to ensure that the vendor they partner with can offer stability, security and flexibility.

Rekha Weerasooriya, senior general manager of CX and people development at Dialog Axiata, noted that this is not always easy to achieve when vendors often roll out the business development team for pitches but then hand your project over to a different team.

Weerasooriya believes brands should clarify the members of staff involved from the get go so that they know exactly what they are getting:

“When it comes to an implementation team, they might outsource that to different partners hence the promise vs. delivery might not exactly translate to what you have signed up for. Make sure that you [get to] know who your implementation team is, [what their prior success rate is] and that you sign off with clear outcomes in mind.”