Press release

The UserTesting Customer Experience (CX) Industry Survey Finds That 85% of Companies Need to Improve Their Customer Experience

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Sponsored by Businesswire

Customer experience today is changing radically as new technologies
disrupt traditional industries and customers ramp up their expectations
for faster, more personalized service. An experience is made up of many
touchpoints, interactions and exposures that a customer has with a brand
— its product, service, employees, and market messages across multiple
channels — over the duration of the relationship. Great customer
experiences can drive brand loyalty, customer growth and revenue, while
poor experiences can result in lower margins and customer attrition. The
industry’s largest ongoing survey of CX issues, just updated for 2019,
revealed that 85 percent of respondents said their overall customer
experience needs improvement. There’s never been a greater need for
companies to quickly empathize with their customers and understand their
experiences than now.

In the sixth annual Customer
Experience (CX) Industry Report
, UserTesting,
the leading on-demand human insight platform company, identified three
key trends driving customer experience. The trends provide a better
understanding of the challenges companies are facing and what needs to
be done to succeed in the Experience Economy.

Digital Transformation: Many Companies are Struggling

The Digital Transformation concept isn’t new and many C-level executives
and consulting firms list it as a top priority for the next several
years. However, the digital transformation journey has been slow. The
report revealed 40 percent of those surveyed have never heard of digital
transformation. A mere 20 percent reported a successful digital
transformation. Most of the others reported that their digital
transformation is still a work in progress. According to research by
McKinsey, 70 percent of digital transformations fail to reach their
stated goals. Many companies have an urgent need to better understand
how technology is changing customer expectations and what they can do
about it.

CX Trends and Customer Needs: Stay Focused on What Matters

One of the challenges facing companies is understanding which new
technologies really matter. Future trends don’t necessarily reflect
current consumer needs. We asked survey respondents to rank the trends
making the most impact on customer experience today, and which will have
the most impact five years from now. The results showed a stark contrast
between the hot new technologies that are making news, and the more
mundane trends that are actually making a difference today. Virtual
reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) were noted as two top
trends to watch in the next five years but viewed as very low impact for
2018. Tablets and smartphones were listed as the most impactful in 2018
but considered a low priority in five years. The inverse nature of these
technology trends shows a need to focus on both current and future
customer needs. Customer research and human insight must be leveraged to
make informed decisions on what to build and when to build it. What’s
most important is working to always understand the changing needs of the
customer.

Scaling Customer Research: A Top Priority

The need to scale customer research within an organization has never
been more urgent. Traditional customer research is too slow and
expensive to keep up with the needs of modern product development, and
many teams reported that they lack sufficient user research support. For
example, designers reported that 66 percent of their projects didn’t
have any user research help. Researchers understand this struggle. The
survey found nearly 70 percent of CX researchers want teams across their
organizations to have the ability to conduct their own user research.
This sentiment was echoed by C-level executives, with more than 85
percent stating they wanted to enable more people within their
organizations to conduct user research. Establishing a scaled approach
to customer research empowers everyone within an organization to develop
a customer-centric mindset and focus on the customer experience.

“Keeping up with constantly changing customer expectations is a
challenge facing every company today. New technologies ranging from
today’s mobile to tomorrow’s virtual reality continue to alter the rules
for every industry. To stay on top of those trends, companies have to
find ways to bring customer insights into every decision, in real-time,”
said Michael Mace, VP of Market Strategy at UserTesting. “Our report
shows a strong need to empower all teams within an organization to
gather customer insight quickly, so they can make high-confidence
decisions at the speed of digital business.”

Survey Methodology

The survey asked more than 1,600 professionals across a wide variety of
industries how their organizations are approaching customer experience
and conducting CX research. The survey was divided into sections based
on respondent job role, plus a set of general questions asked of
everyone.

To access the 2019 Customer Experience (CX) Industry Report and
compendium of assets, please visit the survey research hub here.

About UserTesting

UserTesting enables every organization to deliver the best customer
experience powered by human insight. With UserTesting’s on-demand Human
Insight Platform
, companies across industries make accurate
customer-first decisions at every level, at the speed business demands.
With UserTesting, product teams, marketers, digital and customer
experience executives confidently and quickly create the right
experiences for all target audiences, increasing brand loyalty and
revenue. UserTesting has over 1,200 subscription customers, including 48
of the top 100 brands in the world, and has delivered human insights to
over 35,000 companies to-date. Backed by Accel and OpenView, UserTesting
is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. To learn more, visit www.usertesting.com.