According to Forrester’s US 2022 Customer Experience Index rankings, CX quality fell for 19% of brands in 2022 — the highest proportion of brands to drop in one year since the inception of the survey.

Market maturity, downward pricing pressure, and lack of sustained demand for point-to-point Ethernet services with SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) will result in the market dropping from $6.35 billion in 2021 to $5.94 billion by 2024.

Sweeping market changes have made it clear that supply chains, long managed to be cost-effective and reliable, must also now be resilient and sustainable. Making this resilience a reality requires executives to have visibility into how materials and goods enter and move through the chain, as well as tracing inputs and outputs all the way to the hands of the customer.

“Supply chain leaders spend a lot of time working to understand and improve their internal operational metrics, but it’s important to introduce customer experience metrics into the supply chain scorecard,” said Beth Coppinger, senior analyst with Gartner.

New Bain & Company research highlights eight themes for brands to consider as they define strategies for a world changed by COVID-19, which has forced potentially dramatic new directions in consumption, altering behaviors in ways that few would have imagined. Some of these trends are clearly here to stay, for others the jury is still out.

Over the next five years, an exponential rise in digital interactions between buyers and suppliers will break traditional sales models, according to Gartner, Inc. In fact, Gartner’s research shows that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels.

Customer service and support leaders must scrutinize all technology investments for their ability to deliver on customer experience (CX) goals, according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner identified 33 must-watch technologies on the Hype Cycle for Customer Service and Support Technologies, 2020.

According to Forrester, consumers no longer need to trade off price, convenience, and emotional experience when making buying decisions. They expect new products, services, and delivery models to cater to all attributes at once. As a result, the future of B2C buying is not a shift from traditional to digital or an abandonment of self-service in favor of delivery; it is all the above.

Outsourcers are increasingly relying on advanced technologies to meet client requirements in the customer experience (CX) outsourcing services industry. The European market is mature and characterized by demands for specific languages, cultural affinity, and nearshoring. COVID-19 has adversely affected the industry in 2020 and Frost & Sullivan expects total market revenue to reach €16.23 billion, a 7.5% decline.

Worldwide revenues for the artificial intelligence (AI) market, including software, hardware, and services, are expected to total $156.5 billion in 2020, an increase of 12.3% over 2019. While this year's growth is somewhat slower than previous years due to the economic impact of COVID-19, International Data Corporation (IDC) believes investment in AI will recover quickly. A new forecast from the IDC Worldwide Semiannual Artificial Intelligence Tracker shows worldwide revenues surpassing $300 billion in 2024 with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.1%.

Artificial intelligence, machine learning and other enablers of predictive and prescriptive analysis have laid the foundation for customer-centric network assurance strategies that will help define successful network service providers (NSPs) as we enter the next decade.

Given the massive amount of change to which consumers are being exposed -- especially when it comes to their mobile lives -- the ability to carefully track the complex evolution of customer sentiment is emerging as a critical discipline among leading players in the different sectors of the automotive industry.

As the mobility industry explores alternative modes of transportation, a maturing rideshare sector, various levels of autonomous transportation -- and many other innovations -- adoption will largely depend on establishing a deep sense of trust among consumers, according to Kristin Kolodge, Executive Director of Human Machine Interface (HMI) and Driver Interaction at J.D. Power.

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have the potential to shake up the customer experience in such a profound matter that 100 million consumers will shop in AR online and in-store by 2020, Gartner forecasts.

Digital transformation is changing the way that people buy, get information and invest. Though wealth management is a relative latecomer to digital transformation, today's wealth management companies and their customers are now relying increasingly on digital processes to purchase wealth management services -- as well as for some basic investment advice, says Michael Foy, Senior Director, Wealth Management Practice J.D. Power, in a new interview for journalists.