Digital Trends 2017: Customer experience enjoys top priority among marketers

2017 will be the year of the customer experience: 63% of international marketing decision-makers want to focus on this this year. Around one in three will rely on targeted content marketing (29%), followed by social media engagement (28%) and personalization (25%) to create an inspiring customer experience. This is the result of the latest "Digital Trends 2017" study conducted by the market research institute Econsultancy on behalf of Adobe. More than 14,000 marketing managers were surveyed as part of this global study.

According to the survey, the digital transformation of companies has made further progress compared to the previous year - with significant effects on corporate culture, cooperation between departments, skills, technology and the handling of data. In almost one in two companies (46%), most marketing activities are now digitally driven (2016: 42%). However, for 19 percent of respondents, digital marketing is still separate from other marketing activities (2016: 21 percent).

It all depends on the corporate culture and design

In the companies surveyed, a consistent strategy (78%), the right employee skills (74%) and the right corporate culture (73%) are seen as the key success factors for a convincing customer experience. Above all, design plays an important role in the opinion of global marketers: 86 percent of them are firmly convinced that design-driven companies are more successful than other companies. The appealing design of the customer experience is therefore at least as important as the provision of personalized and relevant content. However, the vast majority of companies (82%) already feel that they are ideally positioned to meet this challenge. More than three quarters (77%) invest primarily in design in order to create a high level of brand recognition. Only 41% believe that their company does not have the necessary processes and collaborative workflows in place to play this design trump card.

"2017 is the year of the customer experience. The need for experience-oriented business has finally been recognized, now it's time for implementation. Good content and an appealing design are undoubtedly important components, but they are not enough on their own. For inspiring customer experiences, the right database is crucial. After all, if you don't really know your customers, you won't be able to offer them a tailored customer experience. However, when it comes to analytics, many companies still have a lot of catching up to do," says Stefan Ropers, Managing Director Central Europe at Adobe.

Customer experience will determine marketing in the coming years

For the marketers surveyed, customer experience is by no means a short-lived trend, but will remain a top issue in the future: a convincing customer experience is one of the most important challenges for the next five years for more than one in four (29%). Product and service innovations, customer service and product quality are clearly behind with 17 percent each. When it comes to optimizing the customer experience in the future, the focus will be on expanding analysis capacities (63%), improving internal communication between marketing and creative teams (53%) and improving internal workflows (53%). By 2020, a quarter of the marketers surveyed plan to use virtual or augmented reality to motivate customers to become more involved. Artificial intelligence and bots are particularly popular in Europe as important future technologies in marketing.