Three digital challenges facing technology organisations

Companies in the technology sector are more likely to be digital leaders, with 19% classifying themselves as digital-first.

This is according to findings from our new Digital Trends in Technology report, published in association with Adobe.

By Nikki Gilliland May 25th 2017 11:13

Based on a sample of over 900 respondents working in the technology sector, the report investigates how committed tech organisations are to digital transformation, as well as how this impacts their wider customer experience strategy.

Despite a digital-first approach – with increasing competition and shifting customer expectations – the sector is still facing some key challenges.

Here are a few charts from the report to explain further, which subscribers can download in full here.

Ensuring a consistent CX

81% of technology respondents agree that their organisation has a ‘cross-team approach with the customer at the heart of all initiatives’.

Despite this, the real challenge lies in ensuring a consistent CX across the board. After all, the ‘customer’ could refer to anyone from an individual buying a single product to a large corporation implementing enterprise tech.

So how can organisations diversify and personalise their product offering to suit individual customers?

Many tech companies appear to be focusing on digital content in order to do so, with 56% planning to increase their budgets for content marketing in 2017.

The need for expertise and skills

Almost three quarters of tech respondents think that optimising the customer journey across multiple platforms will be ‘very important’ for their digital marketing over the next few years. This is especially the case for those who claim to be ‘digital-first’, with 82% citing its importance compared to 71% of the rest.

Naturally, the biggest obstacle for implementing this is the expertise and skills required.

It is becoming a growing priority, however, with the proportion of respondents saying they have ‘the people they need to engineer good customer experiences’ increasing by 9% in the last two years.

Meanwhile, 90% of digital-first organisations already have the necessary skills in place, and 16% are more likely to consider training as ‘very important’ in the near future – which is especially encouraging considering the rate of innovation within the sector.

Investing wisely in a new wave of innovation

While 29% of respondents plan to use product or service innovation to differentiate themselves from competitors – compared to just 26% for customer experience – digital-first organisations have a different perspective.

The survey found that digital-first organisations are 52% more likely than the rest to see customer experience as a key differentiator – which can be interpreted as a reflection of their digital maturity.

Unsurprisingly, the technology sector looks set to be the first industry to truly take advantage of innovation, being three times as likely as others to see artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the IoT as exciting prospects in the next few years to come.

Integration of this technology is dependent on budget, of course. But while large corporations will be better equipped to invest, the opportunity for smaller businesses could lie in collaborating with others to test whether or not these technologies will truly benefit the customer.