Key Findings

To understand the current state of customer experience (CX) management, Qualtrics XM Institute surveyed 168 CX practitioners at companies with 1,000 or more employees about their organizations’ CX efforts and asked them to complete our CX Competency & Maturity Assessment. Highlights from the research include:

CX is a top priority. Customer experience is a ‘significant’ or ‘critical’ priority for 69% of respondents’ organizations. Seventy-seven percent have a centralized customer experience group, and 68% have a senior executive in charge of customer experience across products and channels.
Organizations are planning to expand into new CX technologies. Over fifty percent of respondents say their organization is planning to use predictive analytics and artificial intelligence ‘somewhat’ or ‘significantly’ more than they were doing so last year. Forty-four percent of respondents’ organizations plan to use journey analytics more, as well.
Most organizations are in early stages of CX maturity. Just 2% of organizations reached the top stage of CX maturity, Embed. Most are either in the first stage of maturity (Investigate, 33%) or the second stage (Initiate, 44%). Evaluate your organization’s CX skills and competencies to find out your current performance using the Customer Experience (CX) Maturity Assessment.
CX Leaders’ business outcomes benefit more from their CX programs. CX Leaders (companies with CX Competency & Maturity Assessment scores above the median score) reported that their customer retention, cross-selling, employee retention, and cost reduction all benefited from the CX program more frequently than CX Laggards.
CX Laggards lack strong CX leadership. CX Leaders cite ‘competing organizational priorities’ and ‘poor integration across systems’ as their top obstacles to CX success, while CX Laggards are more likely than CX Leaders to say that ‘inconsistent executive buy-in’ and ‘lack of leadership for these efforts’ are top obstacles.