Jitterbit recently took a deep dive into business automation, surveying 167 IT, marketing, and HR professionals about automation applications within their firms and paying particular attention to the overall customer experience.
The findings? While customer experience was outranked only by IT in terms of being the most automated function, 60% of respondents said they don’t find it easy to deliver “optimal customer experiences.”
And among functions and departments that businesses are prioritizing for additional automation, customer experience ranked 5th (at 39%), behind IT (58%), HR (50%), finance/accounting (44%), and marketing (40%).
“While CX remains one of the most automated functions within an organization, it has its own challenges,” the report says. “The constantly growing application landscape, and especially the growing Martech stack, poses integration challenges. Two-thirds of respondents found application integration as either an extremely or very challenging hindrance to delivering an optimal customer experience. The integration challenges are accentuated by reliance on central IT and manual or legacy point-to-point integrations.”
(Source: Jitterbit)
Jitterbit compared the average number of applications (17) and data sources (28) that Deloitte Digital had said are being used by companies today to manage customer data, and found that 83% of marketing systems have fewer than 10 systems integrated, which means that “more than half of these applications are not communicating with each other, often resulting in an abundance of customer data silos across the organization.”
Four out of five respondents said that, in the next year, their organizations plan to invest in integrating their marketing systems.
“Increasingly, CRM is the primary driver of integration within organizations at 52 percent,” the report says. “Customer data in CRM systems is being used to gain a better understanding of the customer’s journey. This illustrates the shift from ERP as a system of record to the CRM system. It highlights how organizational focus is increasing on the customer data and not only on the financial and the operational data that you get from ERP systems.”
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