Top future of customer experience predictions for 2023

IDC predicts that by 2024, 50% of the A1000 will adopt CDPs (Customer Data Platforms) as the enterprise customer data service for real-time customer interactions like a central nervous system, increasing CX metrics and revenue by 5%. This is just one of IDC’s predictions unveiled in its latest report, IDC FutureScape : Worldwide Future of Customer Experience 2023 Predictions – Asia/Pacific excluding Japan ( APeJ ) Implication s.

The storms of disruption – geopolitical tensions, inflationary pressures, supply chain issues, and talent crunches – are driving uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment across Asia/Pacific, impacting both B2B and B2C segments. Facing such headwinds, organizations are reexamining their business priorities to delicately balance between growth and financial discipline.

Customer experience (CX) has been thrust to the forefront of business priorities as organizations seek to understand, empathize, and relate to what the customer is going through. IDC’s 2022 Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending (FERS) Survey Wave 10 showed that Asia/Pacific organizations prioritized customer satisfaction on an almost equal footing with operational efficiency as the number one priority.

Organizations are allocating budgets away from aggressive customer acquisition strategies towards initiatives improving customer resilience and increasing customer lifetime value. CX investments with capabilities such as a strong foundation of customer data, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and zero-trust architectures will be key areas of focus for CX executives. Future customer experiences will be built on the back of customer data to elevate context, deliver immersive experiences, and create real-time value for the customer. This will give rise to an era of new customer metrics, greater focus on quantification of customer and business value, and the increase in number of trusted communities with customers as active participants in the experience ecosystem.

“With macroeconomic uncertainty affecting both B2B and B2C customers, it has become imperative for organizations to empathize, contextualize, and deliver immersive customer experiences to come out ahead. By leveraging tools such as Customer Data Platforms (CDP) for a unified view of customer data to act upon, AI/ML to elevate context, and Web3 technologies to create new immersive experiences, organizations will be able to create new customer engagement models, creating value for both customer and business outcomes in this new era of CX innovation,” says Seng Keong Low, Research Director, CX and Digital Native Business, IDC Asia/Pacific.

IDC’s top ten Future of Customer Experience predictions identify the most important trends and related areas of opportunity in APeJ:

1: Customer effort replaces CSAT: By 2026, one-fourth of Asia brands will abandon CSAT as a measure of customer experience and adopt a Customer Effort Score correlated to outcomes as a key indicator of journey satisfaction and success.

2: Customer data trails: By 2024, 50% of the Asia-based 1000 organizations (A1000) will adopt CDPs as the enterprise customer data service for real-time customer interactions like a central nervous system, increasing CX metrics and revenue by 5%.

3: Customers as collaborators: To foster loyalty and a competitive edge, 50% of the A1000 will own online communities by 2027 and core IT application integrations will enable a new wave of collaboration and outcome-based insights.

4: CX begins with employees: By 2027, 40% of A1000 will incorporate employee experience initiatives into their core CX strategies to compete in CX, talent acquisition, and retention but will struggle to measure EX (Employee Experience) +CX (Customer Experience).

5: Immersive content equity: Adopting Web3 technologies will drive 40% of A1000 brands to create new immersive experiences, accessible content, engaged communities and grow the CX creator economy into a US$80 billion market by 2025.

6: Engineered serendipity: By 2025, 45% of the A1000 will use AI/ML to elevate context and nudge customers into unfamiliar and novel experiences that simultaneously improve sentiment metrics and brand upselling potential.

7: Customer value quantification: By 2024, at least 35% of Asia-based organizations will introduce new success metrics to track and measure the internal and external flows of customer value creation.

8: Customer success becomes vital: By 2024, 50% of A1000 enterprise customers will primarily select their CX platform provider based on the efficacy of the vendor’s customer success services.

9: Data sharing risks: By 2024, 30% of Asia-based organizations will be forced to expand data management and privacy measures to mitigate risks of data breaches caused by ecosystem partners costing US$4.6 million per breach.

10: Community – The metaverse gateway: By 2027, 30% of A1000 companies will build safe communities to foster interpersonal guardrails for future metaverse platforms — and collect first-party data.

CT Bureau