The ‘Enterprise Customer Experience’ Market Is Taking ShapeThe ‘Enterprise Customer Experience’ Market Is Taking Shape

Today’s customers demand seamless and contextually relevant experiences. They also expect the brands with which they interact to respond at the right time, at the right place, and with the right message. This new digital-first market reality belongs to enterprises that do the following:

To lead the efforts in this new reality, enterprises need proactive outreach orchestrated from real-time, integrated data. They must deliver personalized engagements, capabilities that sense and respond to customers’ needs, empower employees organized around the customers and align to the customer strategy. They also require intelligent networks and immersive experiences delivered through emerging tech.

The urgency to meet customers’ new digital-first demands has resulted in the growth of the tools, technologies, and platforms that enhance customer engagement. Before the global pandemic, transforming the customer experience was considered the lowest digital transformation priority among Omdia’s annual Enterprise Insights survey that interviewed 6,000 IT professionals. This time, it revealed a dramatic shift in importance—transforming the customer experience moved to the top of their digital transformation priorities. 76% of enterprises consider the customer experience more important now. Other notable achievements include 75% of enterprises want to create digital capabilities and 67% want to build the modern workplace. Additionally, in this year’s survey, 73% of respondents said that technology platforms are “very important” or “important” to their digital strategies over the next 18 months.

This growing acceptance of building digital infrastructure in addition to a rapidly changing technological landscape is also reshaping the market. Advances in the cloud and other emerging technologies, a burgeoning digital engagement technology ecosystem, and faster adoption through increasing business model innovation are all factors that are shaping an emerging market that Omdia refers to as Enterprise Customer Experience (eCX). The category will further take shape with customer engagement platform vendors making acquisitions in adjacent categories. Additionally, traditional CCaaS vendors are launching their own customer engagement platforms to proactively orchestrate relevant offers and communications at the right time and place.

Omdia’s Market Landscape: The Customer Journey Orchestration Ecosystem pointed early on to the signs of the market taking shape. It examined the convergence of the market’s categories, including customer data platforms, customer journey analytics, customer journey mapping and visualization, digital asset management, customer journey orchestration, and marketing optimization. Since then, the market has seen further convergence with shifts in workplace collaboration and CCaaS.

This expanding ecosystem of technology vendors, partners, and serviced integrators works in tandem to integrate and monitor all customer activity, collaborate in real-time on that activity across the enterprise, and orchestrate action. Currently, no single vendor offers a complete solution, although the market should see further convergence in the coming months to meet the demand for enterprises’ increasing need to deliver relevant communications at the point of interaction.

eCX consists of a system of integrated marketing, sales, and customer service strategies and technologies that focus on optimizing the customer experience. Adopting such a customer-centric practice involves more than tools and technologies; it also necessitates an enterprise-wide mindset that places data at the center of the organization and organizes employees around the customer to enable end-to-end visibility and the ability to respond at the right time, with context. This requires the necessary capabilities to integrate, listen, analyze, and act through an empowered culture with employees who can easily orchestrate.

Whereas customer engagement management includes a set of technologies to enable cohesive engagement within a specific department or function, eCX incorporates the technologies and processes that bring together an entire enterprise and organizes employees around the customer, an entry-level requirement to having a successful business in 2022 and beyond. When employees look at their daily responsibilities through a CX lens, they can more easily spot trends, implement new processes, and monitor and evaluate the impact these changes have on overall satisfaction and retention rates.

The new digital-first, post-COVID environment pushed customers and enterprises in new and innovative directions. Now, the best chance of succeeding in this new market paradigm is adopting an eCX approach to customer engagement.