As we move beyond COVID-driven restrictions, IDC's Future of Customer Experience predictions for 2023 reflect how B2B and B2C businesses must confront a new set of macroeconomic challenges – inflation, global economic instability, and flattening customer growth – while still navigating new hybrid work and organizational leadership models. Customers are demanding greater value, more memorable and immersive experiences, and greater control over how they engage with enterprises, becoming equal stakeholders in the customer experience (CX) ecosystem.

Going forward, customer-centric business resilience will require enterprises to move beyond transactional-level experiences and tie business outcomes to relationship-based experiences that will be fulfilled by delivering customer value and trusted customer outcomes. Building and scaling these desired outcomes will require CX executives to leverage strong technology foundations comprising customer data, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), and zero trust architectures.

These CX initiatives will usher in an era of new customer metrics, greater focus on quantifying customer and business value, and trusted communities where the customers' role will evolve into an active participant in the experience ecosystem, as both creators and consumers of experiences. With digital business models becoming a steppingstone to the future enterprise, the imperative to maintain the human element in the customer experience will assume even more importance.

"In a world of accelerated uncertainty, the next era of CX innovation will be led by those brands that improve value for the customer through empathy and delivering outcomes for customer success," said Sudhir Rajagopal, research director, Future of Customer Experience at IDC. "Thrivers will share and apply intelligence at the speed of customer engagement, create new customer engagement models and metrics for a digital business, and tap into the power of decentralization/Web3 to create equitable value parity in customer and business outcomes alike."

IDC's top 10 predictions for the Future of Customer Experience are:

Prediction 1: By 2027, one-fourth of global brands will abandon CSAT as a measure of customer experience and adopt a Customer Effort Score correlated to outcomes as a key indicator of journey satisfaction and success.

Prediction 2: By 2024, 50 percent of the G2000 will adopt customer data platforms (CDPs) as the enterprise customer data service for real-time customer interactions like a central nervous system, increasing CX metrics and revenue by 5 percent.

Prediction 3: To foster loyalty and a competitive edge, 64 percent of the G2000 will own online communities by 2027 and core IT application integrations will enable a new wave of collaboration and outcome-based insights.

Prediction 4: By 2026, 40 percent of the Global 2000 will incorporate employee experience (EX) initiatives into their core CX strategies to compete in CX, talent acquisition, and retention, but will struggle to measure EX+CX.

Prediction 5: Adopting Web3 technologies will drive 45 percent of global brands to create new immersive experiences, accessible content, and engaged communities and grow the CX creator economy into a $300 billion market by 2024.

Prediction 6: By 2026, 45 percent of the Global 2000 will use AI/ML to elevate context and nudge customers into unfamiliar and novel experiences that simultaneously improve sentiment metrics and brand upselling potential.

Prediction 7: By 2024, at least 30 percent of organizations will introduce new success metrics to track and measure the internal and external flows of customer value creation.

Prediction 8: By 2025, 50 percent of G2000 enterprise customers will primarily select their CX platform provider based on the efficacy of the vendor's customer success services.

Prediction 9: By 2024, 30 percent of organizations will be forced to expand data management and privacy measures to mitigate risks of data breaches caused by ecosystem partners costing $4.6 million per breach.

Prediction 10: By 2026, 40 percent of G2000 companies will build safe communities to foster interpersonal guardrails for future metaverse platforms — and collect first-party data.