Regional Approaches to Customer Experience

When it comes to delivering a positive customer experience (CX), it never hurts to look around and see where others are in their CX initiatives. Earlier this week, we discussed how different industries are doing. Now, let’s look at how the different regions around the world compare in Oracle’s new CX survey, Global Insights on Succeeding in the Customer Experience Era.

In this survey, we asked business executives across 18 countries in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia Pacific to provide their thoughts on CX within their organization. In some cases, all regions were closely aligned with their mindsets and strategies. In other cases, some regions were a bit further ahead in implementations and plans.

When asked what the potential average annual revenue loss is for not delivering positive CX, all geographies were close in their estimates:

Potential Revenue Loss

• Global - 20%
• North America - 21%
• Latin America - 22%
• Europe - 18%
• Asia Pacific - 20%

North America leads in having advanced CX programs in place, well ahead of the global 20% mark. Asia Pacific is last in this category. Although one could certainly argue that with only 29% of respondents having advanced CX programs, North America still has a long way to go when it comes to CX execution. Companies that do not consider themselves advanced either have one or more active implementations or are still assessing or planning with no active implementations.Across all regions, more action is required. Businesses should accelerate their planning and focus on executing a CX strategy and programs, or risk falling behind.

With respect to future spending, Latin America leads with a higher estimated growth in spending on CX technology in the next two years—well ahead of the global average. Businesses plan to invest in a variety of technologies to address their top priorities: improvethe cross-channel customer experience, improve the online customer support experience, and improve the online customer purchase experience. Planned technology investments include business intelligence and customer analytics solutions, integrated customer view across channels, and loyalty management systems.

Each region faces different obstacles in delivering positive CX, but there was one obstacle that was consistently ranked among the top three across all regions: siloed organizations. Organizational alignment is critical for a successful CX strategy, and all businesses, regardless of where they are headquartered, understand the challenge to change their culture to be more customer-centric.

Stay tuned for further blog posts over the coming weeks. We’ll dive into the different region’s results in more detail.