Key Findings

To understand the current state of customer experience (CX) management, Qualtrics XM Institute surveyed 168 CX practitioners at companies with 1,000 or more employees about their organizations’ CX efforts and asked them to complete our CX Competency & Maturity Assessment. Highlights from the research include:

  • CX is a top priority. Customer experience is a ‘significant’ or ‘critical’ priority for 69% of respondents’ organizations.  Seventy-seven percent have a centralized customer experience group, and 68% have a senior executive in charge of customer experience across products and channels.
  • Organizations are planning to expand into new CX technologies. Over fifty percent of respondents say their organization is planning to use predictive analytics and artificial intelligence ‘somewhat’ or ‘significantly’ more than they were doing so last year. Forty-four percent of respondents’ organizations plan to use journey analytics more, as well.
  • Most organizations are in early stages of CX maturity. Just 2% of organizations reached the top stage of CX maturity, Embed. Most are either in the first stage of maturity (Investigate, 33%) or the second stage (Initiate, 44%). Evaluate your organization’s CX skills and competencies to find out your current performance using the Customer Experience (CX) Maturity Assessment.
  • CX Leaders’ business outcomes benefit more from their CX programs. CX Leaders (companies with CX Competency & Maturity Assessment scores above the median score) reported that their customer retention, cross-selling, employee retention, and cost reduction all benefited from the CX program more frequently than CX Laggards.
  • CX Laggards lack strong CX leadership. CX Leaders cite ‘competing organizational priorities’ and ‘poor integration across systems’ as their top obstacles to CX success, while CX Laggards are more likely than CX Leaders to say that ‘inconsistent executive buy-in’ and ‘lack of leadership for these efforts’ are top obstacles.

Figures

Here are the figures in this Data Snapshot:

  1. Time with Centralized CX Team and Leader (see Figure 1)
  2. Priority of Improving XM (see Figure 2)
  3. Effectiveness of Customer Interaction Channels (see Figure 3)
  4. Evaluating CX Technology, Competency, and Culture (see Figure 4)
  5. Evaluating CX Agility (see Figure 5)
  6. Core CX Metric and Customer Listening Posts (see Figure 6)
  7. Usage of Insights from Listening Posts (see Figure 7)
  8. Obstacles to CX Success (see Figure 8)
  9. Looking Ahead: CX Technologies (see Figure 9)
  10. Calculating the CX Maturity Assessment (see Figure 10)
  11. CX Competency and Maturity Results (see Figure 11)
  12. CX Competencies: Leaders versus Laggards (see Figure 12)
  13. CX Agility: Leaders versus Laggards (see Figure 13)
  14. Business Outcomes: Leaders versus Laggards (see Figure 14)
  15. Financial Benefits: Leaders versus Laggards (see Figure 15)
  16. Channel Effectiveness: Leaders versus Laggards (see Figure 16)
  17. Core CX Metrics: Leaders versus Laggards (see Figure 17)
  18. Usage of Listening Posts: Leaders versus Laggards (see Figure 18)
  19. Effectiveness of Listening Posts: Leaders versus Laggards (see Figure 19)
  20. Obstacles to CX Success: Leaders versus Laggards (see Figure 20)
  21. Company Culture: Leaders versus Laggards (see Figure 21)
  22. Methodology (see Figure 22)