Every year Econsultancy release their Digital Trends report with what they see being the trends that will appear over the next 12 months based on some broad spectrum surveying.

There are some really strong consistent themes about Customer Experience being a company wide initiative and not owned by a single team, optimisation is vital and businesses while recognising the value of data aren’t doing what’s required to derive value from data. My favourite take-away’s were these but it’s definitely worth having a read yourself:

• “Despite the continued focus on customer experience, organisations are not building their data and analytics capabilities fast enough.”
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• “Interestingly, this year’s survey findings highlight that building a culture and cross team approach with the customer at the heart of all initiatives is ranked as most difficult to achieve by 13% of respondents but easiest to achieve by 12%.”
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• “…the decline in those stating that they are a ‘digital-first’ organisation is picking up speed, having dropped three percentage points, from 14% in 2015 to 11% in 2017. As last year saw more organisations delve more deeply into delivering connected and digitally integrated experiences for their customers, many have come to realise the full extent of what being ‘digital first’ really means.”
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• “On the one hand, companies that were previously hamstrung by legacy systems are increasingly taking advantage of cloud technologies, Software as a Service (SaaS) and managed services to catch up with more advanced, agile competitors.”
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• “This might suggest that we are witnessing some ‘head in the sand’ behaviour from marketers. While they aim to optimise the customer experience, they are not building their data capabilities fast enough to facilitate this.”
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• “One of the most well-known innovators of all time was Thomas Edison. Edison is popularly known for the invention of the light bulb. In actual fact, there were other inventors who developed various types of light bulbs at around the same time. Edison’s genius, however, was that he recognised that the device itself didn’t offer much value without a system of electricity around it to make it truly useful. And so to deliver electricity he was able to conceive of, and invent, an entire industry of power generation and supply.”

Take a look below or download here.