Not long ago, we predicted that 2025 would be another year of customer experience (CX) mediocrity. However, this rather gloomy outlook is also an opportunity for bold leaders keen to buck the trend. Many will aim to do so by doubling-down on digital experiences. According to Forrester’s 2024 Priorities Survey, adding or improving digital experience is the top action that business and technology professionals who indicated that improving the experience of their customers is a priority for their organization are taking to improve the customer experience. Experience optimization (EO) solutions enable you to do exactly this: To improve digital experience in real-time by collecting and ingesting data, analyzing data to generate insights, and ideating and delivering thousands of different personalized digital experiences. Forrester defines EOs as:
Solutions that enable the ongoing delivery of relevant, timely, and optimized digital experiences to meet evolving customer needs by leveraging cross-channel customer interactions.
Experience Optimization Solutions Support A Broad Range Of Use Cases – Helping Organizations Win, Serve, And Retain Customers
By helping digital teams understand and meet customers’ unique and evolving needs, EO solutions help their organizations win, serve, and retain customers. They also support a range of different use cases. The core use cases enabled by EOs are experimentation; next-best product, offer, or action; next-best experience; and experimentation with recommendations or personalization. Extended use cases focus on customer audience and segments, UX/product/customer behavior understanding, cross-channel optimization, automatic optimization opportunities discovery, customer feedback and experimentation, feature experimentation.
EO Solutions Leverage GenAI To Help Companies Manage Personalization At Scale
The EO market has evolved from basic online testing capabilities to offering AI-powered personalization and generative AI (genAI) applications, such as opportunities identification, creative assets generation, or segments creation.
If you are looking to purchase or upgrade your EO solution, you can leverage our newly published Experience Optimization Wave to evaluate the top 11 players and identify the best vendor for you. As you consider your options, pay attention to the following differentiators:
Generative AI: Providers with robust generative AI capabilities have the potential to streamline the creation and optimization of digital experiences, thus facilitating a more tailored customer journey.
Data integration: Advanced EO solutions stand out by integrating diverse data sources, not limited to digital interactions, to enable more effective personalization.
Strategy support: Look to EO providers that offer not just technology but also strategic guidance, helping their clients to refine and implement effective EO strategies.
But Don’t Count On Experience Optimization Solutions To Satisfy Your Analytics Requirements
Our research revealed a gap (and an opportunity) around digital analytics. Regardless of the vendor, EO customers complained about the analytics capabilities provided in the platform. While they acknowledge the necessity of integrating EO solutions with their Digital Analytics solution to better inform EO activities as well as understand their performance, they would like EO solution providers to strengthen native EO analytics capabilities. For instance, a multi-brand company told us that it’s currently unable to compare EO performance across its various brands within their EO platform. Instead, they need to download the data from the EO solution and conduct this analysis separately.
This is not surprising in the context of EO history: Vendors in this space are focused on helping clients take action on data, and this is their core job, but they underestimate the importance of the analysis that informs experience optimization. No one expects EO vendors to become the next Google Analytics, but improving analytics capabilities is a clear opportunity in two areas: 1) understanding what parts of the experience need to be optimized and for which customers; and 2) understanding the performances of optimization activities to identify potential improvements.
If you wish to understand the EO market better and which EO solution can be right for you, please schedule an inquiry or a guidance session with us.
