New IDC Study Shows a Disconnect Between Customer and Employee Experience

The International Data Corporation (IDC) 2015 EXPERIENCES Survey shows that providing a consistent experience across multiple engagement channels is a key focus for companies as well as the means to ensuring that employees, business partners, and suppliers have a unified view of interactions.


Customer experience has been the most visible and important "experience" initiative to date. According to the survey, 81% of respondents use customer satisfaction surveys to measure the customer experience with their company. Yet many organizations are wrestling with the interactions they deliver versus the technology that has been put in place to "manage" these interactions. And when it comes to employees, 69.4% of companies do not measure their experiences at all. These "experiences" can incorporate prescribed business processes, corporate strategy, business impacts, and perceived challenges. 

Training and hiring are critical to delivering excellent experiences across customer, employee, partner, and supplier. However, it is a continuous challenge for many organizations. As the nature of work changes and business processes become more ad hoc, training employees to manage exceptions, while at the same time delivering seamless interactions across multiple engagement channels, will become increasingly complex but essential.

"The pressure to deliver differentiation as a means of competitive advantage is a critical driver for the changing nature of experiences across customers, partners, and suppliers," said Vanessa Thompson, research director, Enterprise Social Networks and Collaborative Technologies at IDC. "The ability to link customer experience, workforce, commerce, business networks, and innovation together in order to deliver a holistic view of digital and social transformation is at the epicenter of the differentiation and can more appropriately be termed business modernization." 

The IDC study, The Opportunities and Challenges of Delivering Superior Experiences: IDC's EXPERIENCES Survey, discusses survey findings and highlights some of the core elements that go into creating and delivering "experiences" across customers, employees, partners, and suppliers. A total of 799 senior executive-level decision makers in the United States were polled on their current and future technology, business plans, and perceptions related to the experiences being delivered to customers, employees, partners, and suppliers.