Episode Transcript
[00:00:22] Speaker A: Hello, and thanks for tuning in to this episode of our Metrosite podcast. I'm Beth Schultz, vice president of research and principal analyst, responsible for our employee experience research.
Joining me today is Robin Garris, CEO and principal analyst for our customer experience research. Hello, Robin.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Hi, Beth, and thanks for having me here today. I'm delighted to talk about this research.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: And Erwin Lazar, who is president and principal analyst for our workplace collaboration research. Hello, Erwin.
[00:00:53] Speaker C: Hey, Beth. Good to see you again. And again, also excited to talk about our research.
[00:00:58] Speaker A: Yeah, so, you know, let's tell folks why, why we did this research. So we really wanted to get together today to share some insights of this research that we had coming out later this week. It's on enterprise tech spending outlook for the rest of 2022 as well as 2023. So given today's uncertain economic climate, we really felt it important to get a sense of how the economy might be affecting spending plans in our core areas of customer experience, workplace collaboration, and employee experience.
So just a couple details. We conducted this study in August with 400 companies globally across all company sizes and verticals. And we evaluated overall company spending as well as tech spending, with breakdowns for growth or decline across a variety of technologies, and drill down specifically in customer experience, workplace collaboration, and employee experience.
So, Robin, you spearheaded this study. Share some of the high level findings with folks.
[00:02:01] Speaker B: I'm happy to. So, in addition to what Beth said about looking at some of our core areas of technology coverage, we also looked at some of the top, some sort of high level company spending trends. So we are definitely seeing the economy is affecting general business spending. So 49% of companies said that they have slowed their spending, their hiring, their travel to different degrees.
But decision making is accelerated among 38% of companies. So we're seeing some mixture there. There's some ways that the economic uncertainty is affecting companies in one way or another.
But even though about 26% of companies, only about 26% of companies actually said that they would be increasing overall spending in 2023, 49% actually do plan to increase their technology spending, and by an average of 26%. So tech spending is strong, which is good. So we also looked at different business units in the study. So we looked at sales, marketing, customer service, HR, legal, product development, R and D, commercial real estate, just different areas of spending to see whether those were going up and down. Of course, our clients have access to all that data. And we also drilled down into specific research areas. Beth already mentioned workplace collaboration, customer experience or customer engagement and employee experience. But we also drilled down into other areas of research of where we'd see spending, you know, an increase, decrease and by what percentages. So in addition to those areas I just mentioned, we also looked at security, wan and network spending, peripherals, laptops and computers, wireless and professional services. So all that, we have data on all that, obviously, it's too much to go into today, and it's, you know, something that all of our clients do have access to.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: Okay, great, Robin. So good, good overview, kind of seed setting. What can you tell us about CX funding in particular?
[00:04:07] Speaker B: Well, CX spending was really fascinated, actually, because as you looked at all the other technology areas, CX spending was very, very strong. In fact, the strongest it was 65% of companies plan to increase their CX spending in 2023 at this point by an average of 24%. And that's gotten even stronger, actually, since April when we last looked at the technology spending plans in the area of CX. So really kind of goes to what some of those top drivers are. Why do we see, why do we see companies doing this? Why are they spending in a time of economic uncertainty? But they're seeing things like it reduces their opex. So it's an investment that ultimately saves them money. There's so much demand right now for self service that they can't put the brakes on that at this point. That started emerging at the pandemic and it's continuing. And then there's also technology simply needed because there's a shortage still at about half of the companies now for their contact center agents. So that's another big reason. So we drilled down into other areas within CX. We looked at, oh, gosh, a lot of different areas. Workforce optimization, various areas of AI, voice of the customer, quality management, voicemail metrics, NLP management tools, all sorts of things. So we do have drill downs on those, whether they're going up, down by what percentage.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: Great. So I know you'll be sharing a lot more details on CX spending in a webinar later this month. What can you tell us about that webinar?
[00:05:36] Speaker B: Yeah, so I'm going to be doing a webinar, actually, five nine, because they're really interested in this whole area of the priority of customer engagement and customer experience and contact center technologies. So we're going to do a webinar together and we'll be delving into a lot more depth some of the details of CX spending. For sure.
We'll look into AI because that's such a big area that companies are evaluating. But I think more importantly, we're really going to look at why you would actually be putting your company at some risk if, at this point you decided to reduce spending. And this is even more so important in a down economy or in a questionable economy than it is in any other economic time. So I think that's going to be a really good discussion. A lot of good research data. Python has a lot of good, like, firsthand knowledge in this, a lot of good customer stories in this that they're working with. And that's going to be on September 27 at 10:00 a.m. central, eleven eastern in our bright talk channel. So there's no charge for anyone to attend. You just create a free bright talk account. It takes about 10 seconds and you're in.
[00:06:41] Speaker A: Okay, so September Central, eleven Eastern, we have to put it on our calendars now. How about you, Erwin? You know, what do you consider some of the top, maybe the top three takeaways on workplace collaboration spending?
[00:06:56] Speaker C: Yeah, I think echoing a little bit about what Robin mentioned, that there is that downside of not increasing spending in order to remain competitive, especially as companies are dealing with increasing changes in where people are working in the competitive landscape. So we drilled down specifically into the collaboration space, let's say the three biggest takeaways. The first is that collaboration spending continues to increase. About 25% of participants in the study said that they were continuing to increase their spending on collaboration technologies. Only 7% said that said that they were decreasing. The majority were holding flat. So I think that shows you that companies are not specifically looking and saying, well, we need to pull back on collaboration spend, but rather potentially as a means of overall organizational efficiencies, they're continuing to increase. The biggest area of increase was around video, especially around room video. So we've seen in our research over the last couple of years, as companies have moved to that hybrid work environment, that they want to achieve equity. They want to ensure that for the people meeting in the people in the office, in the meeting room, and the people who are working remote, that they can achieve a collaborative experience that allows everyone to contribute equally. And that usually starts with video. So we continue to see investments in upgrading video rooms, upgrading video endpoints, ensuring, again that people have a high quality experience versus the older ways of doing video. Or everyone was using whatever lowest common denominator devices or had room systems that weren't updated to support, say, hd video.
And then lastly, one of the big, other big areas that we saw was around management.
We have continued again in our research over the last couple of years to see a strong correlation for companies who invest in proactively ensuring employee experience in terms of voice and video quality, regardless of where those employees are, and especially for people who might be working at home, and overall collaboration, communication success. So investing in the ability to troubleshoot remote employee connectivity issues, voice issues, video issues, etcetera, leads to overall measurable improvements in terms of cost savings, revenue generation, productivity gains, and so on. So I think, as we continue in this very uncertain economic time, you don't want to ignore the need for employees, again, regardless of where they are, to communicate and collaborate internally and even with customers. As Robin talked about earlier.
[00:09:30] Speaker B: I know, Erwin, you had mentioned that most of the. We have about 25% of companies increasing spending. That was actually through the end of 2022. So I want to make sure that we're giving the same data, because the data that I was giving about customer experience was actually for 2023. And that same number for workplace collaboration outlook in 2023 is actually almost 52% of companies were going to increase their spending in workplace collaboration. So I just want to make sure we're talking about the same sets of data. So the one where I talked about 65% of CX, it's actually 52% of WC for the 2023 outlook.
[00:10:05] Speaker C: Thanks, Rob.
[00:10:06] Speaker A: So we also looked at employee experience in the study as well, and we know that employee experience, you know, was a big focus, obviously, during the.
During the pandemic.
What we saw in this study is that for most of the companies, spending for the rest of 2022 is going to be flat at about 63.1% of folks told us that. But 26.6% or so are seeing spending on employee experience planning to increase through the end of 2022. And some of the biggest things they're spending on are those sort of big employee experience management platforms, those kind of multimodal platforms that allow you to do things like encourage employee engagement and look at performance management career development.
We also saw see that folks are investing in collaborative goal setting that's fed sort of objectives and key results. You know, these are the tools that allow everybody to be working towards sort of a mutual goal, and employees across the board are invested in how the company is doing. And then Internet and digital workplaces are also seeing some higher levels of investment.
Another point is that the outlook for 2023 does look strong as well. And more than half of companies, about 53.3%, they're planning to increase spending by an average of about 24% in 2023. But as my last takeaway, I want to share that there is a caveat, and that is if companies are forced to make cuts, guess what? Employee experience is going to be on the chopping block. And that's unfortunate since, you know, there was so much renewed emphasis on employee experience, which we've seen in our previous research. But it's also one of the things that is not going to continue to get attention if companies, again, if they're forced to force.
[00:12:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
Awesome. That's really information.
That was really interesting information as well. Bessel, thanks for sharing that. And I guess as we are wrapping up, I just want to remind everybody about the webinar that we're doing on September 27. I'll be drilling down into a lot more of this detail, so please join us for that.
And I think that we're going to wrap up now, Beth, right?
[00:12:40] Speaker A: Yeah. And again, watch out for that webinar. We'll also be doing more. You know, we obviously just giving you a high level overview of what we have available in this text, funding research. We'll be doing more slicing and dicing of the data. So do keep your eye out on the metrogy website for additional insight from this text spending study. And with that, on behalf of Erwin and Robin, goodbye till next time, and take care, everybody.
