Survey Reveals Global Views on Customer Experience Goals and Challenges

The concept of customer experience has been around for a very long time, but in the last couple of years it has become a hot topic due to the explosion of digital and social media. It’s all about the shifting balance of power between the customer and the marketer; and with digital media the power belongs to the customer.

Customer experience is truly the key to a customer’s heart – that is why it’s a hot topic today. Brands and marketers cannot dictate how customers think about brands, so the only way a marketer can attempt to balance out this power shift is to influence the customer experience. 

Creative Virtual, a provider of customer experience self-service solutions for global enterprises, recently released the findings of its first survey on global customer support challenges. The survey posed questions about customer support goals, current practices, future intentions and technology usage in the customer service market. The report, “2013 Global Customer Support Outlook Survey,” reflects global views on how companies are tackling the customer support experience. This includes present challenges, budget allocations, contact volumes, and usage of technology to augment their customer support efforts between 2012 and 2013.

“It’s important to gain perspective on how companies are assessing the customer experience by taking a look at where they are dedicating time and resources,” said Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO of Creative Virtual, in a statement. “The data starts an intriguing dialogue amongst organizations if they can identify gaps and opportunities in their customer playbook and act accordingly.”

With contact volumes increasing across channels, companies put customer experience at the top of their list rating several key goals as extremely important. The top five goals for EMEA are:

1. Improve customer experience (68%)
2. Resolve customer inquiries faster (55%)
3. Increase usage of self-service tools (40%)
4. Increase customer engagement (40%)
5. Reduce call and chat volumes to live agents (38%)

In addition, results in North America were similar:

1. Improve customer experience (79%)
2. Resolve customer inquiries faster (60%)
3. Obtain better data for measuring customer satisfaction (55%)
4. Increase usage of self-service tools (49%)
5. Increase customer engagement (40%)

“These sentiments provide insight as to how businesses are executing against their key goals as it relates to specific challenges within the customer support channel,” said Ezekiel. “The survey explores how companies are responding by revealing how increased contact volumes fuel the need for a multichannel strategy, budget allocations, and newer technologies such as virtual assistants to manage the customer experience.”

For the complete results, click here: http://info.creativevirtual.com/UKcustomersupportsurvey

About the Author: Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist of the Marketing Division at IIR USA, has a background in digital and print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology. Amanda is the Editor at Large for several of IIR’s blogs including Next Big Design, Customers 1st, and ProjectWorld and World Congress for Business Analysts, and a regular contributor to Front End of Innovation and The Market Research Event,. She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where she covered breaking news and feature stories in the technology industry. She can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmandaCicc

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