Most firms lack tech to deliver customer experiences: Study

While delivering personalised customer experiences (CX) is top priority for businesses, most of them are still lagging behind in adoption of technologies that can help them achieve their targets, an Adobe study said.

The majority (64 per cent) of organisations are either basing their marketing activities on a fragmented approach with inconsistent integration between technologies (46 per cent) or have little or no cloud technology (18 per cent), said the report titled ‘Digital Intelligence Briefing: 2019 Digital Trends’.

Results show that less than one in 10 businesses globally (nine per cent) have a highly integrated, Cloud-based technology stack.

As for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), organisations worldwide seem evenly split between those that have already recognised ways these technologies can help their businesses and those that have yet to identify the benefits.

Data revealed that 50 per cent of respondents are already using or are planning to invest in AI and ML.

Executives in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region seem positive about automation, with only 24 per cent describing themselves as “cautious”, compared with 34 per cent in the US.

Further to that, APAC businesses (24 per cent) state they have experienced a positive rather than negative impact from the increased focus on consumer data protection.

Personalisation will remain an area of focus for organisations looking to provide an advanced customer experience this year.

“With CX taking precedence as a key business driver, personalization will be the fuel powering the experience wave across sectors,” Sunder Madakshira, Head of Marketing, Adobe India, said in a statement.

Two in five (44 per cent) marketers said the biggest challenge they face this year is difficulty getting a holistic view of customers across all interactions.

In fact, almost one-third of marketers see a lack of marketing technology integration as a barrier to securing an end-to-end view of audience and customer interactions, said the Adobe study based on a global survey of 12,815 marketing, advertising, e-commerce, creative and IT professionals working for both brands and agencies.