EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

To understand the mindset and roles of customer experience professionals today, we surveyed 237 CX professionals and then compared their responses to similar studies we’ve conducted over the previous five years. We asked them how their CX efforts impacted their organization last year and about their plans for the coming year. This report also includes a compensation study, which is based on the 158 respondents who agreed to participate. Here are some highlights from the research:

• Eighty-four percent of respondents say that their customer experience efforts have had a positive business impact in 2016.
• Ninety-nine percent think that customer experience is a great profession to be in, the highest level we’ve seen in the six years we’ve been doing the study.
• Eighty percent think that customer experience will be more important for their companies in 2017 than it was in 2016, compared to the 3% who think it will be less important.
• Forty-nine percent expect to see an increase in their customer experience staffing levels this year – a higher percentage than we’ve seen in previous years.
• Respondents plan to increase their spending most on voice of the customer software and text analytics.
• Respondents plan to increase their focus most on Web experiences and customer insights and analysis.
• The total amount of compensation in our study ranges from $93,000 for mid-level individual contributors to $239,000 for CX executives.

This report was originally published by Temkin Group prior to its acquisition by Qualtrics in October 2018. It has been reformatted, but no substantive changes have been made to the content.