Marketers Lack the Skills to Deliver on Customer Experience

More executives are waking up to the potential of customer experience, a marketing technology discipline that uses data analytics and personalization to build stronger relationships with consumers.

In fact, more than a quarter of executives worldwide who currently use data analytics have seen a significant shift across the board in their ability to deliver superior customer experiences, according to February research from Forbes Insights.

But despite the discipline’s advantages, many organizations find they fall short on the real-world customer experience strategies they’re actually able to implement. Data from Accenture Interactive and Forrester Consulting, which investigated actions executive decision-makers are taking to improve customer experience, less than half had taken action around customer experience activities, like improving analytic capabilities or creating more valuable content.

According to many of these same decision-makers, much of the fault for this growing inability to take action is internal. In the same Accenture and Forrester Consulting survey, many marketing executives point to a lack of necessary customer experience skills among employees. For example, less than 50% of respondents said their organizations had all the necessary skills related to customer experience disciplines such as project management and data analytics.

Meanwhile, the same internal issues were evident when it came to collaboration. 50% or less of respondents in the survey said they had workspaces that encouraged collaboration, while only 41% said they had dedicated business, design and development teams permanently “co-located” near one another to help facilitate information sharing.

Courtesy of eMarketer