A majority of marketing and customer experience executives say that, in the coming year, they will be aligning their offerings with new or changing customer expectations and sentiments. Alongside this, a report [download page] from Mitto and Demand Metric suggests that marketers and customer support professionals believe that customers will be more demanding in 2022.
Per the June 2021 survey of more than 600 respondents from B2B and B2C companies, 64% of marketers and 58% of customer support respondents anticipate that customers will be more demanding this year. By comparison, considerably fewer expect customer demands to remain the same (32% and 41%, respectively), while only a scant few anticipate customers will be less demanding (4% and 1%, respectively).
Research by Validity and Demand Metric from last year found that not only are marketers saying that email marketing is still effective, but one of their main objectives for using email is to communicate with customers. In fact, this recent report indicates that email is used by the majority of both marketers and customer support professionals to connect with customers. Although about the same portion of marketers and customer support professionals say they also connect with customers through SMS, marketers are more likely than customer support to use social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter to communicate with customers.
On the other hand, customer support is more likely than marketing to currently use voice to connect with customers. That said, it does appear that more marketers plan to use voice in the next year. Some 3 in 10 marketers who do not currently use voice say they will be leveraging it in the next 12 months. More marketers who didn’t previously use channels like Google Business, Instagram and email also plan to add them to their mix.
While marketing and customer support are using various channels to connect with their customers in order to meet their anticipated growing demands by providing a satisfactory customer experience, that doesn’t mean they own the customer experience. Indeed, the largest share (34%) of respondents say that the CEO makes the final decision about customer experience strategy, while fewer companies put that responsibility in the hands of the Head of Marketing (18%) or Head of Customer Support (18%). This finding is also highlighted by earlier research that shows that delivering better customer experiences is one of the main priorities in the next few years for top-performing CEOs.
The full report can be found here.
About the Data: Findings are based on a June 2021 survey of 619 respondents at B2B and B2C companies.
