One of the most common narratives pushing digital transformation investments forward is the idea of elevating customer experience (CX) by creating a connected customer journey across all channels of engagement. Unfortunately, for most enterprises today, the reality is that omnichannel execution still lags dreadfully and omnichannel strategy remains largely aspirational.
A new survey out this week from Dimension Data shows that only 8.4 percent of organizations have managed to connect all of their channels. Not only are organizations still muddling through tactical systems integration and data formatting issues across channels, but they also have a bigger strategic problem.
“Channels are managed separately and tracking is done by individual channel owners, so for most there’s limited to no visibility of the CX journey across channels,” states the “2019 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report,” which examined the practices of 750 enterprises worldwide.
This is likely a function of the tone from the top of the organization, which has not done enough to consolidate decision making about CX. Only about a third of organizations have a centralized decision-making function for CX, and only a little over half of organizations have a single person accountable for CX performance. Tellingly, only about 30 percent of organizations say that accountability resides in the C-suite.
“The result is the fragmented and disjointed tracking of customer journeys, user behaviour and channel performance,” the report says. “It seems there’s still some work to be done in shifting attitudes and operating models to being truly CX-focused.
