Designed to help technology, marketing and customer experience managers, 2023 Planning Guides published by Forrester highlight the areas in which it will be necessary to increase investments or on the contrary reduce expenses in 2023.
Customer experience, data, innovation… So here are some tips to help marketers and business leaders prioritize their budget for the coming months…
Areas to increase investment in 2023:
Customer knowledge and commitment.
As 2023 is unlikely to resemble any of the past recessions, many assumptions about customers and their behavior will be rendered useless.
Leaders need to invest in new customer data and analytics tools, such as experience research platforms (XPR), to refine audience targeting strategies.
Technologies that improve the customer experience and reduce costs.
The headwinds of today’s economy will require a focus on technology fit for optimization and resilience.
Leaders should invest in tools that drive retention and reduce operational costs, such as robotic process automation (RPA) and agent assistance apps.
Areas in which investments will have to decrease in 2023:
Technical debt – including cloud.
Many thought the cloud would be the antidote to technical debt, but yesterday’s lifted and moved workloads are now debt themselves, given how inefficient they were to operate and how difficult they were to upgrade.
In 2023, executives should consider early cloud deployments as candidates for technical debt reduction.
Low quality data partners and innovation outsourcing.
Partners will continue to play an important role in growth, but two key areas are ripe for cuts.
As the quality of third-party data continues to decline, leaders should streamline these partnerships to retain only those that add value to customer relationships.
Second, companies that have relied too heavily on partners for digital innovation during the pandemic-induced digital sprint should bring more innovation in-house.
Fields of experimentation in 2023:
Extended Reality, Metaverse and Web3 that provide immersive experiences.
These interrelated – and arguably over-hyped – technologies promise immersive experiences tied to token-based ecosystems that use cryptocurrencies and public blockchains.
Leaders in consumer industries should experiment with precursor metaverse platforms like Roblox and Decentral to open doors to new audiences.
Intelligent agents that make experiences more human.
An intelligent agent (AI) can make decisions or render a service based on its environment, user-provided data, and experiences.
Leaders should plan to experiment with intelligent agents continuously in order to exploit their full potential.
“Leaders must navigate a tumultuous business landscape defined by global unrest, supply chain instability and soaring inflation, not to mention the aftermath of the pandemic.
Tackling 2023 budget planning is a daunting task, but Forrester’s planning guides will help leaders make more strategic and disciplined decisions to drive business growth at such an uncertain time. »
says Sharyn Leaver, research director at Forrester