In the midst of a tough economic climate and high levels of competition across most sectors, businesses are shifting their focus to a few core priorities.
A Datacom-commissioned TRA survey of more than 300 businesses across Australia identified three focus areas: growing core revenue, increasing workforce productivity and keeping IT systems running.
The same survey also showed recognition of the gaps in employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) strategy and technology.
Some of the more confronting stats to come out of the survey included:
- Australian and New Zealand organisations wasting 110+ hours a week – or the equivalent of three FTE staff – on CX activities that they shouldn’t need to carry out if they had the right tech in place.
- Over 60% of Australian and New Zealand organisations are expecting to make significant changes to their CX strategy this year or undertake a refresh or modernisation of their entire strategy.
- Over 55% of New Zealand organisations and nearly 60% of Australian organisations are expecting to make significant changes to their EX strategy this year or undertake a refresh or modernisation of their entire strategy.
Looking at the results of the survey, Datacom has identified key CX and EX strategies and activities that can help support the top three business priorities.
“There are foundational improvements that can be implemented, such as moving to cloud-based tools to support customer engagement, that will offer greater flexibility and agility and might see you upgrade your CRM or CCaaS environments.”
In the ebook “Being better”, which looks at the evolution of CX and EX and how to deliver more connected experiences, the Datacom team outlines critical approaches to help businesses understand their customers’ journeys and the importance of moving beyond surveys as a tool for understanding customer sentiment.
“Customer experience (CX) metrics like NPS provide only a snapshot and rely on customer effort to share feedback. The worst part of any survey experience is that most customers feel their feedback isn’t acknowledged or actioned. Switch to a brand listening strategy by looking broadly across all digital sources where your brand might be referenced.”
The “Being better” ebook also contains insights around deploying text-based customer service channels, mining insights from sentiment analysis and speech analytics, and harnessing the power of generative AI as a support tool, for example in developing conversational AI solutions.
Datacom Connect commissioned research into the customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) markets in Australia and New Zealand. TRA surveyed respondents from more than 300 organisations in Australia & New Zealand – respondents had to have responsibility/direct knowledge of the organisations technology investment and strategy, including CX and EX.