Between December 2018 and January 2019, Aberdeen surveyed 369 customer experience (CX) executives across the world from companies of all sizes and industries to determine the key trends and best practices influencing CX programs. One of the questions in this survey was if respondents have changed their CX technology providers – and for those that did, the top reasons why they changed. The findings provide valuable insight into what CX leaders expect from their technology providers (Table 1).
Table 1: Top Reasons Why Companies Stop Doing Business with Their CX Solution Providers
Note: This question was asked as a multi-choice question as companies may change their CX technology providers for multiple reasons. Hence the percentages in the above table don’t add up to 100%.
Before diving deeper into analysis of the above findings, it’s important to note that ‘CX Solution’ covers all technologies companies use to manage customer interactions. These include systems such as CRM, contact center, self-service, marketing automation, etc. As such, Table 1 shows the top reasons why companies have decided to change the technology providers of one or more solutions they replaced.
The number one reason why CX leaders abandoned their current technology providers is the lack of perceived value, compared to the cost of deploying and using related technology tools. Underlining the fact that lack of value refers to perceived value is critical here. Technology truly helps CX leaders address numerous challenges. However, the benefits from each technology depend on the maturity level of how CX leaders use relevant technology tools.
For example, analytics is a very powerful technology capability. However, without a clear program on how to use analytics, which metrics to track and analyze, etc., companies won’t get the most out of their investments in this technology.
If your company struggles with getting the most out of your current technology tools, we recommend that you contact the provider to note your challenges and ask for guidance on how to get the most out of your current technology toolbox. You can also use online communities provided by many technology providers to interact with your peers (other CX leaders) to learn how they use the same technology to achieve the results you’re struggling to achieve.
Almost equally rated as top reasons why firms changed their CX technology providers were poor user experiences and lack of relevant features and functionality. Together, these two data points tell an important and compelling story.
Feature and functionality of solutions are important early during the technology acquisition process. However, when those tools are deployed, employees must be able to easily use them to do their jobs. Hence, if user experience is not a part of your solution evaluation criteria when buying CX technology solutions, we recommend making it a part of your criteria in the future. This will help minimize the risk of employees struggling to use technology tools to accomplish CX objectives. It will also minimize the risk of potentially costly and complex technology replacements.
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A surprising result from the survey findings was that lack of solution reliability was the fifth top reason why CX leaders changed their technology provider (cited by only 5% of the respondents). This is surprising, as unreliable solutions that don’t function as needed—or that result in excessive downtimes —hinder the ability to accomplish CX objectives.
Takeaway
I think most CX leaders expect reliability (the overall solution uptime and non-failure) to be part of the overall value they will get from their technology solution. As such, it’s important for CX leaders to ascertain the reliability of their CX technologies, but also consider it in tandem with other factors such as the user experience, cost, etc.
Following the above recommendations will help CX leaders minimize the need to replace technology tools by following a more careful technology acquisition process. If you don’t currently use the above factors as part of your evaluation criteria for new or existing CX technologies, we highly recommend you do so.
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