As we move beyond COVID-driven restrictions, we must now confront a new set of macroeconomic challenges – inflation, global economic instability, and flattening customer growth – while still navigating new hybrid work and organizational leadership models. These disruptions are significantly impacting customers across B2B and B2C markets.
Customers are now demanding greater value, more memorable and immersive experiences, and greater control over how they engage with enterprises, becoming equal stakeholders in the customer experience (CX) ecosystem. Going forward, customer-centric business resilience will require enterprises to move beyond transactional-level experiences and tie business outcomes to relationship-based experiences that will be fulfilled by delivering customer value and trusted customer outcomes.
IDC’s Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey shows that in the 12-month period from July 2021 to June 2022, enterprises globally prioritized customer experience (CX) and operational efficiency – placing them on almost equal footing.
Building and scaling empathetic customer outcomes will require CX executives to leverage a strong technology foundation comprising customer data, AI/ML, and zero trust architectures. A few leaders are even dipping their toes into the Web3 pool. Future experiences will be tied to customer data as an enterprise service that gathers intelligence across the CX ecosystem to elevate context and deliver novel, immersive experiences that create more value parity for customers.
These CX initiatives will usher in an era of new customer metrics, greater focus on quantifying customer and business value, and the rise of trusted communities where the role of the customer evolves as an active participant in the experience ecosystem, as both creators and consumers of experiences. With digital business models becoming a steppingstone to the future enterprise, the imperative to maintain the human element in customer experiences will assume more importance.
In a world of accelerated uncertainty, the next era of CX innovation will be led by those brands that improve value for the customer through empathy and delivering outcomes for customer success. Thrivers will share and apply intelligence at the speed of customer engagement, create new customer engagement models and metrics for a digital business, and tap into the power of decentralization and Web3 to create equitable value parity in customer and business outcomes alike.
IDC’s top 10 predictions for the Future of Customer Experience in 2023 are:
- Prediction 1: By 2027, one-fourth of global brands will abandon CSAT as a measure of customer experience and adopt a Customer Effort Score correlated to outcomes as a key indicator of journey satisfaction and success.
- Prediction 2: By 2024, 50% of the G2000 will adopt CDPs as the enterprise customer data service for real-time customer interactions like a central nervous system, increasing CX metrics and revenue by 5%.
- Prediction 3: To foster loyalty and a competitive edge, 64% of the G2000 will own online communities by 2027 and core IT application integrations will enable a new wave of collaboration and outcome-based insights.
- Prediction 4: By 2026, 40% of the Global 2000 will incorporate employee experience initiatives into their core CX strategies to compete in CX, talent acquisition, and retention but will struggle to measure EX+CX.
- Prediction 5: Adopting Web3 technologies will drive 45% of global brands to create new immersive experiences, accessible content, and engaged communities and grow the CX creator economy into a $300 billion market by 2024.
- Prediction 6: By 2026, 45% of the Global 2000 will use AI/ML to elevate context and nudge customers into unfamiliar and novel experiences that simultaneously improve sentiment metrics and brand upselling potential.
- Prediction 7: By 2024, at least 30% of organizations will introduce new success metrics to track and measure the internal and external flows of customer value creation.
- Prediction 8: By 2025, 50% of G2000 enterprise customers will primarily select their CX platform provider based on the efficacy of the vendor’s customer success services.
- Prediction 9: By 2024, 30% of organizations will be forced to expand data management and privacy measures to mitigate risks of data breaches caused by ecosystem partners costing $4.6 million per breach.
- Prediction 10: By 2026, 40% of G2000 companies will build safe communities to foster interpersonal guardrails for future metaverse platforms — and collect first-party data.
Interested in learning more? Watch our on-demand webinar, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Future of Customer Experience 2023 Predictions.
