92 per cent of respondents in a new Harvard Business Analytics report believe that effective customer engagement is “extremely critical” or “very critical” to the success of an organization.
88 per cent of executives also agree that customer engagement has a significant impact in their organization’s bottom line.
36 per cent rated their current customer engagement as “good,” while only 9 per cent rated it as “excellent.” This reinforces the report’s position that organizations of all sizes have difficulty delivering personalized customer engagement at scale.
Several factors prevent companies from ensuring effective customer engagement.
44 per cent of executives picked poor cross-functional team collaboration, 32 per cent of respondents said that their organizations fails to properly distribute data-driven customer insights within their organizations, and 60 per cent of executives claim their organization is not tailoring its communication well with their current tools.
56 per cent of executives identified scarcity of skilled workers as another major obstacle.
Personal and efficient customer experience offers many benefits. 69 per cent of executives believe it helps to ensure greater loyalty and retention, while 40 per cent believe it can be used to measure or track the success of customer engagement efforts.
In order to tackle the identified obstacles, 56 per cent of executives claim there is need to encourage greater cross-functional team collaboration with the explicit aim of improving customer engagement.
“This requires functional departments such as customer service, sales and marketing to work together to provide customers with a world-class, cohesive, personalized experience across the customer journey. Organizations need to ensure that any investments in technology and cross-collaboration center around a culture that values customer engagement,” the report states.
The sources for this piece include an article in TechRepublic.