Dive Brief:
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Customer service and support leaders are prioritizing customer journey analytics this year, working to provide analysis of customers’ interactions across time and channels, according to a Gartner survey of 246 leaders released Monday.
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More than half of leaders said that they would invest in customer journey analytics in the next 12 to 18 months. Almost half of that group said they would be investing in customer journey analytics for the first time.
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Leaders identified investing in self-service options and experimenting and deploying generative AI use cases as other top priorities.
Dive Insight:
Customer journey analytics was once a niche market available only to those customer service leaders who could afford best-in-class solutions. Today, those analytics services are both more affordable and accessible, and are becoming a priority for customer service leaders.
Kim Hedlin, senior principal researcher in Gartner’s customer service and support practice, said one of the big explanations for this shift was on the vendor side.
“A couple of years ago if you wanted to buy a customer journey analytics solution, you were looking at mostly buying a niche product from a best in breed company,” Hedlin told CX Dive. “But within the last couple of years, there have been a flurry of acquisitions within this space and those acquisitions have made it cheaper to get these solutions and also easier to add it to what you already have.”
The need for customer journey analytics has also increased as customers’ expectations for good CX are no longer limited to customer service.
“The bar keeps going up for them in terms of what a good customer experience looks like,” Hedlin said. “And so where they used to imagine the customer journey as within the service department, now they're being asked to contextualize any individual service interaction within a more holistic customer journey and they need tools then that can help them do that.”
Customer journey analytics solutions provide that holistic insight and data that can then be used to improve self-service options and generative AI use cases — two other priorities for customer service leaders.
In addition to the survey, Gartner conducted in-depth interviews with customer service leaders about their reasoning behind their priorities in a report.
