• Lack of customer insights is the biggest challenge to a successful customer experience strategy for 54 per cent of marketers surveyed.
• Over half of companies say they are unable to identify customers on their own website.
• Data-driven customer experience strategies are crucial for success.

Mapp, the international provider of insight-led customer engagement, today released the results of a study on current customer experience strategies. The findings reveal that, while 89 per cent of respondents think a CX strategy is important or very important to business success, less than half (47 per cent) review and evaluate their CX strategy annually or even less frequently. Nearly the same amount (88 per cent) agree that it is important to understand changing customer needs using customer analytics to improve CX. Yet only half (55 per cent) of CX and marketing decision-makers plan to implement customer analytics in 2021.

Customer experience is paramount – but implementation is still lacking

Those companies that do plan to implement customer analytics tools expect to use it to facilitate improved customer insight (75 per cent), gain a better understanding of customer intent (55 per cent), and improve their ability to update their CX strategy (55 per cent) in an agile manner. A full 80 per cent of marketers expect enhanced personalisation.

Despite the clear benefits, companies face major hurdles when it comes to updating their CX strategy. Respondents cite the difficulty of linking business outcomes to real customer needs (83 per cent), insufficient technology platforms (77 per cent), and a lack of vision and alignment among leaders, teams, and employees (72 per cent).

Lack of insights as the biggest challenge to improved CX

Although customer experience (CX) and customer insights are not new to the marketing industry, many marketers still face the challenge of gaining truly relevant customer insights to keep pace with end-user expectations.

Over half (53 per cent) of marketers say they are unable to identify customers on their website, even though this is the foundation for gaining insights and driving CX. Following Google’s announcement that it will no longer support third-party cookies, first-party data will play an even more important role, as valid data collection and the identification of the right insights are more important than ever. For 54 per cent of respondents, the lack of customer insights is by far the biggest challenge when it comes to enabling better brand experiences. Fifty-seven per cent of marketers surveyed consider lack of skilled talent being their primary challenge in delivering better CX.

At the same time, however, only a quarter attribute their success in recent years to talent improvement. This proves that while hiring and developing qualified staff is important, using the right tools for insight-driven marketing offers the greatest economic success. Sixty-five per cent of respondents expect that new technology leads to improved customer insights.

More know-how and sales through customer insights

To better understand their customers’ needs, companies are already investing in their MarTech stacks. For improved customer understanding, the marketers surveyed cite customer analytics (56 per cent), customer data management (52 per cent), and marketing automation (49 per cent) as top investments in the last two years.

In addition, 51 per cent of decision-makers have also already achieved greater performance using customer insights. Companies that have implemented AI or ML tools also report improved ability to update their strategy (62 per cent), greater understanding of customer intent (58 per cent), and improved customer insights (57 per cent).

Ricardas Montvila, VP Global Strategy at Mapp comments, “Our study shows that targeted improvement of the customer experience leads to significantly faster growth and more revenue and should, therefore, be a top priority for every marketer. Given the focus on online business models, marketing must be aligned even more efficiently to achieve this. After all, understanding customers is the basis for brand experiences that work, and investing in customer analytics is a prerequisite for a marketing ecosystem that enables this understanding. Technology helps to identify actionable insights and user segments for highly personalised customer experiences and to place brand messages across channels.”

About the study
The commissioned study was conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Mapp in December 2020 with 203 marketing decision-makers from multi-channel retail, eCommerce, CPG/D2C and financial services in the US, Canada, and Europe.

DOWNLOAD THE STUDY HERE