By Kunal Mehta, Director, Product Marketing
New data shows strategic prioritization of integration and automation to elevate customer experiences.
Customers expect a lot from your company and the products and services you offer. Yet Forrester reports that customer experience (CX) quality among brands in the U.S. declined for an unprecedented second year in a row. Despite more than 80% of business leaders indicating that improving CX was a high priority this year, only 6% of brands have seen a significant increase in 2023 (compared to 10% the year prior).
Giving your customers a top notch experience is the best thing you can do for your company; yet many companies are still struggling to prioritize — and strategize — improving CX.
Recent findings from Jitterbit’s 2023 State of Automation: Eliminate Application Integration Challenges to Elevate Customer Experiences report confirms these challenges are plaguing today’s business leaders, with 60% of organizations saying they do not find it easy to deliver optimal customer experiences.
Why is it challenging today’s organizations to improve CX?
Creating better customer experiences starts by analyzing the systems and applications used to interact with customers and store their data. Without seamless processes or technology in place to gather and unify the customer data you need, it can be extremely difficult and resource-intensive to build the experiences your customers demand.
Data from Jitterbit’s survey uncovered and confirmed the top challenges, priorities, and expected benefits today’s business leaders expect from automating the customer experience process.
Here’s a look at three key trends influencing customer experience this year:
- Automating processes to enhance the customer experience is a top priority
Customer experience ranked second, only behind IT, as the function with the most automated business processes, demonstrating the prioritization of the customer experience function within businesses. Yet despite being one of the most automated business functions already, customer experience remains among the top five that are being prioritized for additional automation of business processes. The key driver for this trend is the desire for businesses to gain a deeper understanding of engagement across the customer journey. - Application proliferation, IT resource constraints, and manual integration are top obstacles to improving customer experience
When it comes to the top challenges preventing organizations from improving CX, the constantly growing application landscape tops the list, with 63% of respondents indicating that’s their greatest obstacle. Two-thirds of respondents also found application integration as either an extremely or very challenging hindrance to delivering an optimal customer experience, which is further accentuated by reliance on central IT and manual or legacy point-to-point integrations. - Integrating and automating marketing operations is a top priority
According to our survey, 80% of respondents are planning to invest in integrating the marketing function over the next 12 months. However, respondents also cited automating and integrating additional business processes, including marketing operations, sales and ordering, billing and payments, fulfillment, logistics, and customer support, as crucial use cases for delivering the best possible customer experience.
How integration and workflow automation build better customer experiences
With Gartner reporting 81% of organizations compete based on CX alone, and with digital transformation happening with unprecedented speed, it is no wonder that organizations are looking for the strategies and tools they need to deliver powerful, unique customer experiences.
By leveraging an integration solution that connects systems and automates customer workflows, such as opportunity to order, order to fulfillment, customer service, or billing, you can streamline and accelerate customer-facing processes, connect different touchpoints, unify customer data, and create actionable insights. Not only does this improve customer experiences, but it also improves productivity and morale for internal teams by eliminating tedious, manual tasks and freeing up room for more strategic, innovative work — creating happier employees, and ultimately, happier customers.
