Improving customer experience and increasing customer loyalty are the two main priorities for companies investing in customer engagement technology, according to a new study from InfoTrends titled, “Customer Engagement Technologies State of the Market 2015.”
The study, which surveyed 800 North American and Western European enterprises within key verticals for their most important business objectives to invest in customer engagement technology (CET), shows that improving customer experience (37.1%) and increasing customer loyalty (36.3%) were the top two objectives for companies planning to invest in customer engagement technology.
Here are the other objectives listed in the study:
Better understanding of customer behavior (31.5%)
Reduce customer churn (23.9%)
Increase upsell/cross-sell (23.3%)
Reduce risk (22.3%)
Reduce IT costs (19.8%)
Drive behavioral change in customers (19.6%)
Reduce strain on IT (19.3%)
Reduce operational cost (17.1%)
Reduce overall communications cost (14%)
Regulatory/legal compliance (11.6%)
Business user enablement (9.9%)
The study was compiled to gain more insight into the market of customer engagement technologies, and to better understand how enterprises adapt these technologies for improving their customer relationships.
The scope of traditional customer communications management (CCM) is expanding, driven by technology innovations that enable enterprises to directly communicate with individual customers, the study says. Therefore, enterprises need to start cultivating their customer relationships by engaging with their customers to maintain levels of customer satisfaction. Customer engagement is the new paradigm for customer communications.
What’s more, the study’s findings reveal a distinct trend of marketing playing an increasingly dominant role in customer communications. As a result, this has caused changes within companies that are now shifting their customer communications from an operational matter toward a strategic matter.