Back In 2013, Walker Information published its future-looking Customer 2020 Report. In it, they predicted that by 2020, customer experience (CX) would surpass both price and product as the ultimate brand differentiator. They had no idea how right they would be.

This year, In its top strategic technology trends for 2021, Gartner confirms customer experience as a main focus for businesses today, but they've upped the ante -- from customer experience to total experience. Gartner research vice president Brian Burke notes, “last year, Gartner introduced “multiexperience” as a top strategic technology trend, and is taking it one step further this year with total experience (TX), a strategy that connects multiexperience with customer, employee and user experience disciplines.

“TX strives to improve the experiences of multiple constituents to achieve a transformed business outcome. These intersected experiences are key moments for businesses looking to achieve differentiation via capitalizing on new experiential disruptors.”

CX. TX. Cue AI...

8x8 surveyed business communications decision makers about their organization’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize these increasingly intersected customer, employee and user experiences. This year’s survey reveals these and other top takeaways:

  1. Respondents have no doubt about the importance of AI: 76% of companies believe AI-based capabilities will revolutionize their business communications; 75% believe they will increase productivity, increase revenue (72%), and lower company risks around security and compliance (64%).
  2. AI adoption is accelerating to optimize CX. Almost a third of companies already leverage AI in the form of chat bots (35%), voice-based conversational virtual agents (32%), and virtual assistants (31%) to optimize CX. The majority of organizations are extremely satisfied with the results: 86% agree these capabilities help resolve customer issues; 81% agree that they do so in a more timely manner; 81% say these capabilities reduce contact center operations costs, and 77% agree they lower costs through improved agent efficiency.
  3. End-to-end interaction AI is the next evolution. The saying goes “happy employees make happy customers,” so organizations are focusing on both. When asked why their organization began evaluating or using AI in the first place, the top three reasons reveal a CX/EX approach and an end-to-end experience future: to improve customer service capabilities (45%); to improve workforce management (34%); to make our jobs easier (29%). When it comes to the latter, 84% of respondents agree or strongly agree that AI will make their jobs easier; 84% also say AI has already improved productivity, in part by eliminating repetitive processes that were previously done manually (80%).
  4. Leaders are being made (and remade) every day: 77% of companies in 8x8’s survey that already have AI-based capabilities in place have only adopted them within the last 12 months. However, 41% of those companies already using AI say they plan to upgrade their current capabilities within the next 12 months, so the window for catching up - and getting ahead - is narrowing. Data readiness is playing a key factor in the adoption and accelerated use of AI for 61% of respondents. Top concerns for organizations center around organizing data (43%), aggregating the data into one location (40%), and time consumed in data readiness activities (40%). It’s for this reason that many organizations choose to purchase a solution with AI capabilities built in. Of least concern to organizations is not having enough relevant data (22%) to make use of.

8x8’s adoption report illustrates a next decade of CX, EX and even TX optimization powered and accelerated by AI in a new operate-from-anywhere environment. Get the full report here, and check out more technology trends to watch in 2021 in 8x8’s Essentials series.