CX poll shows growing adoption of open digital experience

Successful customer experience management (CEM) relies on a balanced interplay between multiple elements, according to a recent TM Forum member poll.

The poll captured the opinion of participants in the CEM framework conference, which took place during TM Forum’s recent Accelerate week. The virtual Accelerate event gathered members from 256 companies, including 110 communications service providers.

When asked which direct interaction elements (cognitive, emotional, physical, sensorial, social) contribute to the total customer experience (CE), 70% of the participants in the CEM framework session replied that all identified elements are important to CE.

TM Forum’s CEM working group numbers 100+ company members. Together they have grouped their activity into four principal areas: Journey Driven IT, Open Digital Experience AI (ODE AI), Data Analytics, Digital Experience & Trust with perceived CE. Their work builds on TM Forum’s existing set of tools and best practices including a maturity model, lifecycle model and over 450 metrics that guide members to improve customer experience and achieve their customer-oriented goals.

Among the key findings of the survey is the growing adoption of ODE, which uses reference IT solutions across business, information, technical and data architecture to transform business & IT agility. Currently 25% of the participants are using an ODE concept to create rich automated customer journeys that deliver business results. In total, 60% of those polled are working towards an ODE as part of their customer engagement strategy.

Meanwhile when it comes to managing the customer experience there was broad agreement on the need for an industry standardized API. Indeed, 50% of the companies represented in the poll take on average one hour or more to respond to and resolve a customer query, which is far from near real time.

Intent

Participants also cited a critical need to transform operational services for customer engagement so that they can support new services and needs. And although the industry is not yet adopting methodologies for contextual analysis with advanced analytics of the customer journey, participants expressed interest in being able to identify actual customer intent. Having identified intent, it is possible to give more sense to a journey and see whether the customer is moving on with their intent. Yet at the same time, companies said they are not yet automating expression analysis, even though this would allow them to identify the customer’s actual intent before they act on customer expressions.

Again, this looks to set to evolve, with half of participants saying they want to contribute to TM Forum’s.

IoCE program (intent oriented CE) and the remainder wishing to learn more.

One surprising finding was the current lack of use of gamification strategies to enhance customer journeys, with about 60% of those polled not having considered using gamification as a tool to improve customer experience.

The working group is currently looking to develop a more in-depth CEM survey and extend it to a larger audience. If you are interested in participating in such a survey, or if you would like to be part of our CEM working group, please contact Adrienne Walcott (awalcott@tmforum.org).