Dimension Data Benchmarking Report reveals challenges in Customer Experience disconnect

Dimension Data, one of the world’s largest global technology integrator and managed services providers for hybrid IT today revealed a number of key findings in their annual Customer Experience Benchmarking Report. The key finding of the report is that organisations need to urgently address a ‘customer experience disconnect’ that can jeopardise businesses where customer loyalty is paramount.

For the uninitiated, the Dimension Data Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report polls 1,100 respondents across 13 industries in 59 countries across the world. It is widely considered to be one of the most extensive reports of its kind in the industry.

Among the key findings of the report are that 67% of respondents in the Asia Pacific region believed that customer experiences are not represented at the board level while only 21% of organisations take a fully integrated, centralised approach to customer experiences.

Another key finding is that 91% of business respondents in the Asia Pacific region believe that customer experience is an important competitive differentiator while 90% say it is critical for driving loyalty. 52% believed that it is important to drive cost reduction while 69% recognised that it is critical for revenue growth.

The disparity here is that only 20% of respondents, less than a quarter are dissatisfied with their own CX services and a mere 11% believe that they are delivering an experience that would drive customers to recommend their organisation to others. This gap between CX capabilities and CX ambitions is a sobering one but many organisations are looking to bridge that gap with CX technologies that include customer analytics, AI and digital integration. Unfortunately, 37% of businesses in Asia Pacific said that the solutions that they’ve implemented so far don’t have the functionality that customers need and more than half (64%) said customer awareness (or rather the lack thereof) is the biggest barrier to adoption.

For 2019, the challenge is how organisations address this disconnect and then implement effective means of benchmarking and reporting to ensure that they don’t reoccur. “Customer experience benchmarking is more important than ever. Brands need to invest in customer experience but they also need to know that those investments are paying off. And if they’re not, they need to know what to change. Right now, it looks like brands aren’t putting the right kind of focus on customer experience and, as a result, they’re not seeing the outcomes they want. That’s bad for them, and their customers,” said Nancy Jamison, Principal Analyst for Customer Care at Frost & Sullivan. To read the report in its entirety, swing by here.