Report: Marketing Executives Bringing Customer Experience to the Forefront

The “Value of Customer Experience in the Digital Age” infographic developed by The Economist Intelligence Unit shows that 64 percent of today’s C-suite executives intend to prioritize their investment in customer experience (CX) over the next three years.

According to the data, about 59 percent of executives say that they see better revenue growth as a result of making it a top priority. C-suite executives claim that in-person and digital communication are both important to CX today. However, the creators of the infographic predict a shift within the next three years.

“Face-to-face communication is [the] most popular channel today, but online assistance support [is] expected to be in the future,” according to the researchers.

Approximately 51 percent of North American C-suite executives said they attempt to measure their CX success in some sense. About 41 percent of executives in the U.S. said that they use their customer retention rate to measure their global CX.

The Role of Marketers in the CX

This data reflects trends found in a survey released by The Economist and Marketo in February 2015, which showed that 80 percent of CMOs believe that they need to restructure marketing to better support their business. Furthermore, the results indicated that marketing’s role in steering customer experience will need to evolve over the next three years to transform it into a revenue driver.

At the time of the survey, a majority of CMOs believed that the marketing department at their organization was most responsible for customer experience. This was in comparison to sales, customer support, product management and finance.

An excess of 25 percent of respondents said that they need to develop more skills in the areas of customer engagement and experience.