Customer experience, or CX, has become one of the hottest topics in business today. However, like many words, when thrown around too much, they can lose their meaning.

Customer experience (CX) has been gaining traction; it’s now much more than just a buzzword and it now requires your immediate attention. Whether you are an insurance firm, a bank, or any other type of business that interacts with people, the customer’s journey plays an extremely important role for attracting and retaining customer base.

Measuring customer experience (CX) can be murky and filled with anecdotal, qualitative information. However, measuring the effectiveness of a CX strategy can be very straightforward. It involves setting goals and performing a quantitative analysis of the results.

We have been writing about the convergence of customer communications management (CCM) and digital customer experience (CX) management technologies for over four years. We researched with Forrester, produced an ebook, and authored a white paper, all digging deeper into the detailed why’s and how’s of the topic.. We were way ahead of the curve then, and still are now.

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance in sophistication and acceptance, robots and technology are taking on more human characteristics and responsibilities in daily life. So ubiquitous has AI become that one Danish study even wonders if robots could be considered our “friends” in the future. Though making connections with machine sounds extremely futuristic, one customer experience (CX) technology available today has improved our ability to get to know our customers on a more intimate basis. Modern digital experience (DX) technologies are changing the game when it comes to making a personal connection.

Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms [paywall] (Gartner, Inc., February 11, 2019) predicts that through 2021, 85% of the effort and cost in a digital experience platform (DXP) program will be spent on integration. That’s partly because Gartner has refined its definition of a DXP, i.e., it is not a monolithic product from a single vendor anymore. Now it is an anchoring tenet in an ecosystem of best-of-breed composition, management, delivery and optimization capabilities that support contextualized digital experiences. It’s also because a DXP is but one piece in the larger mosaic of what Gartner has called the customer engagement hub and others refer to as the digital experience (DX) stack, i.e., the software that powers customer journeys.