Australia Customer Perspectives on Digital Transformation & Customer Experience, 2022

When COVID-19 lockdowns in early 2020 forced businesses to close physical locations, demand for digital options soared as employees shifted to working from home and customers sought alternative means of interaction. Australian organizations made major changes to their processes and technology to address the initial crisis. Their contact centers were busy far beyond capacity, and investments in self-service channels and the cloud accelerated. Plans for longer-term sustainability also had to develop to fend off new market entrants and improve the employee experience in response to the Great Resignation that followed. Frost & Sullivan surveyed decision-makers in Australian businesses to discover their investment plans over the next year. This study uses an integrated 360-degree research methodology to provide insights from end-user organizations, IT decision-makers, and influencers. Not surprisingly, the pandemic had a significant impact on investments. Insights from the survey: - becoming more ‘data centric’ is the highest priority for most businesses, followed by hiring and retaining talent - 3 of the top 5 digital transformation objectives that are being prioritized in 2022 because of COVID-19 relate to improving CX - most Australian organizations are measuring the success of their digital transformation strategy through customer-focused metrics - integrating employee engagement solutions, integrating digital channels, and moving applications to the cloud are highlighted as the crucial aspect of CX priorities - most Australian decision-makers are looking at much deeper areas beyond customer metrics while evaluating the success of their CX initiatives - organization change management issues are holding most Australian organizations from meeting or exceeding their CX objectives - Australian organizations need to evaluate the optimal balance of the way they work/collaborate across teams and interact with customers. Key considerations include ensuring the stability, reliability, and security of their operations, training agents/supervisors on new applications, and persuading customers to use new interaction channels. Channels covered: voice, email/web form, social media messaging apps, social media apps, mobile apps, SMS, chat with live agents, virtual agents, video chat, video teller/kiosk, and interactive voice response Technologies covered: conversational artificial intelligence and virtual assistants/bots, quality monitoring, collaboration tools, performance management, flexible APIs/communication platform as a service, eLearning for agents, proactive customer care, gamification, and augmented reality. This study is valuable for solution providers to better understand what each Australian organization seeks in delivering an excellent customer experience and for Australian organizations to benchmark themselves against the competition and other industries.