These days, most marketers recognise customer experience (CX) is vital for a healthy, profitable brand. But while most marketers want to offer good CX, how best to go about it seems to be the sticking point.

Technology is changing faster than marketers can keep up, offering up a never ending land of promises. Increasingly, hard decisions need to be made regarding which technology to implement and whether it can be tied back to measurable marketing objectives. Technology for technology’s sake can wind up being a costly exercise with no point.

Marketing has become more complex and competitive with the proliferation of data and the abundance of consumer choice in the online and offline worlds. Yet its primary function remains: To communicate with consumers about products and services to meet their needs and wants.

New UK and US research from Gartner is showing a dip in marketing budgets, the first time numbers have dropped under 11 per cent since 2014.

Gartner has identified four technologies it's claiming have the capability to transform how marketers run technology ecosystems and, ultimately, deliver meaningful customer experiences.

Evergage and Dynamic Yield have topped a new report from Gartner on the most innovative and comprehensive personalisation engine technologies in market today.

Taylor Swift doesn’t immediately spring to mind when thinking about facial recognition. Yet the Grammy award winning singer has reportedly used the technology at her concerts to identify stalkers.

CX is not the same as customer service, nor is it another name for user experience, CRM, technology or digital transformation, according to Gartner VP distinguished analyst, Don Scheibenreif.

The top customer experience-focused organisations globally are the ones who recognise they’re the problem, can act boldly, and are even willing to reduce their product lines to make things easier for customers.

Customer analytics is ultimately an exercise in asking the right questions and successful change management, Gartner senior analyst, Melissa Davis, claims. And to get there, you’re better off giving up on a 360-degree of your customers and instead, building a minimal viable customer data view to inform your approach.

Three-quarters of organisations increased customer experience (CX) technology investments in 2018, according to Gartner.

Adobe, IBM, Marketo, Oracle, SAP, SAS and Salesforce have been named as ‘leaders’ in Gartner’s recent Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs report.

Profitability is set to replace customer experience as the chief marketing officer’s number one strategy priority in the next three years as the state of data and technology matures and consumer behaviour shifts further, a new report claims.

​Marketing technology accounts for 30 per cent of the average modern marketing function’s budget, with a third going to services and support, according to fresh research from Gartner.

​MediaMath, Google, Adobe, and Adform have been named leaders in Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Adtech report, with The Trade Desk and Amobee as challengers.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is cementing its place in digital commerce, with a recent Gartner survey finding 70 per cent of digital commerce organisations report that their AI projects are very or extremely successful.

Harnessing digital platforms and AI for customer experience, breaking down situational thinking and embracing journey-based thinking, and finding a north star for engagement are just some of the ways Mercer and Gartner see organisations building better customer experiences.

Dynamic Yield, Evergage, Monetate, Certona, Adobe and Qubit are leading the pack when it comes to delivering personalisation engines to marketer, digital and CX practitioners, a fresh Gartner report claims.

​Measuring CX is vital, but difficult, to do, according to Gartner, as there are hundreds of metrics to choose from and various levels within an organisation to which they should be applied.

Companies looking to automate all their customer experience using artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning are likely to fail at delivering the seamless, post-channel CX experiences customers want.

Today’s brands are too uptight and need to ‘unbrand’ if they’re to have a hope of meeting dynamic and changing consumer expectations, a leading Gartner analyst says.