Enterprises around the world are investing in technologies such as IoT and artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance customer experience in a bid to overcome the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This was the key insight to the latest research from Frost & Sullivan, pointing out that the pandemic challenges have catalysed technology trends across the globe and accelerated organisations' digital transformations sooner than initially predicted.
“More than 50% of businesses have already invested in IoT and digital visualisation. The former offers potential for enhanced CX for organisations in insurance, healthcare, and manufacturing with its monitoring capabilities, and the latter can be valuable for agent desktops to improve employee performance,” said Alpa Shah, Global VP of CX Research at Frost & Sullivan.
She added: “"The retail/wholesale, travel/hospitality, energy, and education industries will invest in AI to facilitate innovation and are most interested in using the technology to boost CX. On the other hand, banking and finance companies, along with government and transportation, are focusing on cost efficiencies."
Other key findings of Frost & Sullivan’s latest research, include:
- Big data analytics takes the lead on investments in transformative technologies, followed by IoT and data visualisation. More than 75% of organisations will be investing in these solutions by 2022.
- Post-pandemic plans for technology investments are focused on moving applications to the cloud (31%), followed by video conferencing (25%). Over the next two years, 80% of CX solutions are expected to be in the cloud.
- The key digital transformation objectives in 2021 are adapting to the new work modes (35%), accelerating digital customer engagement self-serve (31%), and enhancing e-commerce capabilities (30%).
- For 44% of companies, customer satisfaction is the prevalent method for measuring digital transformation success, which aligns with top business goals and investment priorities.
- Cybersecurity continues to be the top concern for 51% of companies; this is only exacerbated by the number of remote workers caused by the pandemic. COVID-19 has augmented the move to the cloud and the use of digital commerce and digital marketing. While CX is a top corporate goal, CX investments are not ranked high.
The research report stated that delivering a holistic customer journey is top of mind among end-user businesses. Finance, healthcare, and travel and hospitality organizations are focused on managing the entire customer journey; high-tech and transportation companies want to leverage CX information across all departments.
"Companies recognise the importance of CX and even measure their digital transformation success on customer satisfaction but tend to invest in solutions that only solve short-term problems," Shah said.
