Study on Customer Experience trends by Accenture

BANGALORE, INDIA: Accenture has conducted an extensive research across B2B companies in 13 countries (1450 respondents at companies that provide products or services to other businesses) to gain deeper insight into how they prioritize and deliver Customer Experience across Sales & Service interactions.

Among its key findings, it highlights that 84 per cent of respondents based in India said the customer experience is important to their companies' strategic priorities. Similar sentiment has been echoed by those based in the U.S. (89 per cent) and the U.K. (88 per cent) respondents. All the respondents from China (100 per cent) are in agreement too.

Majority of respondents based in India (70 per cent) believe that Customer Experience delivery is embedded in their end to end business process. Respondents from China (92 per cent) and the U.S. (73 per cent) also shared the same sentiment.

Also, majority of respondents (71 per cent) believe that engaging customers using new technologies will be critically important. However, 71 per cent of respondents based in India are of the opinion that their performance in this aspect (adopting new technologies) has been good. About 75 per cent respondents based in India believe that recruiting/ training the talent to deliver Customer Experience is critically important. Rest of the countries (US: 85 per cent; UK:71 per cent; France: 83 per cent; Brazil: 83 per cent) also showed a similar trend. However, respondents based in China (91 per cent) believe that they already perform very well in this area.

In order to deal with the sales and customer service experiences in the company, respondents based in India said that they have hired Customer Experience expert(s) to improve in key areas (80 per cent); linked performance reviews to Customer Experience outcomes (80 per cent); linked partner incentives to Customer Experience they deliver (75 per cent); or have conducted change management training (70 per cent).

Majority of respondents (75 per cent) were found to believe that their current method of measuring customer satisfaction is very effective in providing actionable data that business decisions can be based upon to improve the Customer Experience. In agreement with this statement are respondents based in India (89 per cent), US (73 per cent), UK (73 per cent), Brazil (87 per cent) and China (99 per cent)

Majority of respondents (82 per cent) across countries (India: 90 per cent; US: 78 per cent; UK: 86 per cent; China: 98 per cent) believe that over the next two years, Digital will significantly improve their interactions with business customers. More than half of respondents based in India (52 per cent) believe that there will be a significant growth in their business.