Marketers still slow to improve CX

Customer experience still isn’t getting the attention it deserves despite all the clamour from brands about how important it is, according to Adobe and EConsultancy’s annual Digital Trends report.

Surveying more than 12,500 people worldwide across the digital customer experience industry, including marketers and agency executives, the report found that while almost a fifth of respondents said CX was the most exciting opportunity this year, 54% said their CX maturity was ‘not very advanced’. Just 9% of Asia-Pacific respondents classed their CX as ‘very advanced’.

The lack of progress is thrown into sharp relief when Adobe compared its 2015 answers to this year’s respondents.

Technology investment was a leading reason for this lag of CX improvement, with 31% of marketers citing a lack of marketing technology integration. Moreover, 64% of companies said their marketing is based on a fragmented approach with inconsistent integration between technologies.

These implementation problems stand in stark contrast to what marketers want from their technology, with better use of data for more effective audience segmentation top of the list (44%). They also say their biggest challenges include getting a holistic view of customers across all interactions, and tracking marketing effectiveness and media spend.

“Although organisations understand the importance of data-driven marketing and technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, there is a lag in implementation,” said Paula Parkes, Adobe APAC senior director of marketing. “Instead, many companies resort to using a patchwork of technologies, resulting in business fragmentation.”

Regarding data, respondents were also asked about the impact of greater data privacy regulation and its impact on their marketing activities. Here, Asian respondents were most positive, in contrast to Europeans who were most negative.

Tellingly, the role of the so-called ‘walled gardens’ such as Google and Facebook was named the biggest advertising-related challenge facing agencies right now, significantly higher than ad fraud, measurement and viewability.

Adobe also surveyed creatives to find out what their priorities are, which unsurprisingly is creating standout content.