Customer Experience Benchmarking:The State of Mind of CX Professionals

Being a professional in the ever-changing and ever-challenging customer experience field can be isolating. While the trend of having chief customer officers, customer advocacy panels and improving customer experiences is certainly on the upswing, it’s not uncommon to be the only one with customer experience in your title.

I was very intrigued to learn about how a recent survey of more than 130 customer experience professionals aimed to showcase current trends in job titles, customer experience cultures and reporting. The 2014 Customer Experience Benchmarking Study conducted by the Next Generation Customer Experience team from WBR Research does just that. And the results are interesting, to say the least.

A few trends that emerged for me after reading the report:

1. Customer experience professionals are still rookies.

When it comes to having tenure within organizations, customer experience pros don’t have much. Only 10% of the respondents said they had been in their role for more than eight years.

2. Money don’t come easy.

More than half of the customer experience professionals who responded said gaining internal approval for resources and funding for a new customer experience initiative is either slightly difficult or very difficult. The budgets are not reflecting the desire to provide a superior customer experience! It’s not surprising, then, to see these leaders also ranked “lack of strategy, budget and internal resources” as the greatest obstacle to implementing a customer experience strategy.

3. Social media and multi-channel strategies are growing concerns, but in-store experience ranks supreme.

More than 97% of respondents said social media is either a greater priority or the same as its been. And 64% also claim to have a multi-channel strategy in place. But when asked to prioritize, in-store experience earns most of the budget priority. Interesting paradox, in my opinion.

4. Listening alone isn’t enough.

More than 20% of the respondents describe their approach to online customer comments as “listening alone” or “still determining approach.” I personally think that’s a high number for 2014, but it shows how many companies are still trying to figure out their approach. If you are a company like that, you’re not alone!

5. Customer experience is evolving quickly.

The way this survey touched on subjects such as mobile support strategies and measured success for customer experience initiatives goes to show how quickly things are changing. Customer experience as a discipline is stretching and defining itself every day. Buckle up!

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