CEM 2023: Sokos Hotels tops the CEM Benchmark in Finland once again

The local Finnish network of Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), CXPA Finland, has announced the results of the annual Customer Experience Management study. Based on the results, Covid has collected its toll, but the industry is gaining new momentum.

Based on a study that investigated the current state of Customer Experience Management (CEM) in Finland, the hotel chain Sokos Hotels is this year’s leading organisation investing in customer experiences. The number one in the previous study, the telecom and digital services provider Elisa finishes second and the insurance company Fennia, a newcomer to the top of the survey which climbed several places this year, ranked third.

Other organisations in the top are telecom operator DNA and Finland’s most popular online retailer Verkkokauppa.com, which shared fourth place, employment pension company Elo (6th), insurance company Pohjola Vakuutus (7th) and energy company Fortum, which shared eighth place with the Port of Helsinki and Vaisala, a specialist in weather, environmental and industrial measurement solutions.

The average Shirute CEM Index score in Finnish organisations has dropped to a slightly lower level than in previous years.

After the decline caused by Covid, a dedicated budget reserved for the development of customer experiences is again available in more than half of the organisations. The level of activities has also increased: this year, up to 77% of respondents report that their organisations have a lot of CX development projects going on. Despite the improvements, we are still far from the pre-Covid level, when almost nine out of ten reported something similar. Six out of ten still plan to invest more in CX development work in the coming year. The number is down by almost a tenth (7%) compared to the last results. The average size of CX development teams has also continued to decrease.

More and more organisations are now planning to invest in data and people. Developing the organisational culture into a more customer-centric direction remains high on the list of goals for the respondents.

The annual report published today by CXPA Finland and customer experience design agency Shirute was carried out for the tenth time in Finland and internationally.

Jaana Matikainen, concept and development director of SOK travel chain management of the hotel chain Sokos Hotels, which was number one in the international results and returned to the top in Finland, emphasizes the importance of customer experience amid change:

“Thank you very much for this fine recognition! It warms our hearts, especially in these times. The operating environment has been exceptionally volatile in the entire travel and hospitality industry in recent years. Fluctuations in demand, cost structure and workforce have kept us on our toes and in a constant state of change. I am grateful to the entire Sokos Hotels family for their unwavering work towards common important issues. Making our guests happy has remained a matter of the heart and at the core of our value base even during this time.”

“I am happy that we have been able to develop and enrich the customer experiences we deliver even more. Among other things, our constantly renewed hotels, concepts, and digital services have received a great reception. For this, a big thank you to our guests as well! Thanks to their feedback and strong participation, the work continues,” asserts Matikainen.

Two organisations reached the visionary level – the CEM maturity level is decreasing in general

A quarter (25%) of the Finnish organisations that responded to the survey reached the second highest (Executive) level in the overall score this year. The second lowest (Apprentice) level is reached by just over half (51%) of the respondents, a slightly smaller part of the respondents than in the previous study.

A fifth (21%) of the respondents remain at the lowest (Survivor) level. The results show that customer experience management as a whole has remained at the previous level or decreased slightly. This means that there is still room for improvement, even though two organisations reached the highest (Visionary) level. On average, the CEM index score of Finnish companies has remained at 52 points (scale 0-100).

“It has been typical for the overall index to change slowly. The overall Finnish results are characterised by a kind of ‘waiting buzz’. A lot of activities are going on, but it remains to be seen to what extent visible development can be achieved. However, the budget is no longer the number one problem. CX leaders and developers need the management’s support and vision – the customer must be brought back to the management’s agenda. Hopefully, organisations will be able to hire more CX professionals again soon, so that we get back on track with the good development that was going on before Covid hit, and organisations are able to offer meaningful encounters to their customers and employees”, hopes Sirte Pihlaja, head of team at CXPA Finland and CEO of Shirute, which carried out the survey.

A total of 92% of the respondent organisations aim to differentiate themselves from other competitors by developing customer experiences, and 65% still feel that the investments made in customer activities have had a positive effect on the result. In this estimate, however, there has again been a decrease of several percent compared to the previous results.

Almost four out of ten of all respondents see other goals competing for resources (55%) and the lack of a CX strategy (43%) as the primary challenges to developing customer experience management, and almost four out of ten mention the lack of budget (38%). In the previous survey, the lack of budget was seen as the biggest problem.

CX teams have increased development activities, but are still working with more limited resources than before

Customer experience management has been raised to the strategy level in the majority (92%) of the respondent organisations, but clearly fewer respondent organisations than before (57%) now say that the activity would figure among its main strategic goals. There is still a lot of work to be done in restoring customer thinking on the management agenda.

“As we estimated in connection with the latest report, the activities related to CX projects have increased and soon development work will hopefully be done at the previously accustomed level. However, there are fewer resources than before, and respondents see other competing goals as the most important challenge to progress. Many are now also calling for a missing CX strategy, when it would be critical to know where the available resources should be invested,” Pihlaja says.

“Management should take this situation seriously, absorb information and increase its customer understanding, so that it can make good strategic decisions to enable sustainable growth in the long term. Every member of the management team and in a board of directors role should be actively involved in planning how new technologies – e.g. Artificial Intelligence that has taken over our consciousness and everyday life like a tidal wave – can be utilised in the development of customer and employee experiences so that IT does not become an end in itself, but genuinely benefits the different parties involved.”

“At Elisa, we emphasise continuously improving customer perceived value, and this is one of our most important strategic goals. We actively listen to our customers’ voices in all our encounters with them, whether that’s face to face or through digital channels. We analyse a comprehensive amount of feedback, including by utilising AI, so that we can predict our customers’ hopes and expectations, allowing us to become ever more customer oriented in our operations. Creating excellent customer experiences is a matter of honour for all Elisians”, comments Noora Lainio, VP for Customer Experience and Growth at telecom and digital service provider Elisa’s Corporate Business.

More and more organisations now have a dedicated budget set aside or under consideration for customer experience management (61%). This represents a few percent increase compared to the previous report. Again, more than half of the respondent organisations (52%) have a dedicated budget set aside for CX development activities, while at the time of the last survey, only 46% of the respondent organisations had allocated resources for it. That would mean the situation would now be even better than pre-Covid.

The average size of CX teams is on the decline. It has returned to the pre-Covid level, and the most common size is now again 1-2 people. There are CX leaders responsible for developing customer experiences in 65% of Finnish organisations.

CX leaders want to develop customer-centricity in their organisations

Almost seven out of ten (69%) plan to invest more in developing customer experiences, and about a quarter (25%) plan to invest significantly more in CX development work than before. In terms of touchpoints, digital channels (a development target for 75% of the respondents) and multi-channel (65%) emerged as the two most important areas for development. Four out of ten (41%) plan to invest more in physical/store encounters and social media.

“A warm thank you for the great recognition! Our strategic goal is to develop our business with “customer value first” -based thinking. We invest in the comprehensive development of customer experiences in both the short and long term. For us as a mutual operator, it is of the utmost importance to consider our customers, who own us. We just launched a new annual discount for our customers at the beginning of the year – we want to thank especially our long-term customers with this for their loyalty”, says Director marketing and customer experience Heidi Nurminen at insurance company Fennia, who placed third in the total points.

“We are currently building our future services to be even smoother and invest in designing both our products and services to be more customer-oriented. We are also strongly developing our ability to listen to the voice of our customers and measuring their customer experiences, so that we can produce versatile data to support our business decision-making. Our goal is to make the customer’s experience even smoother, easier to understand and more empathetic”, Nurminen promises.

Based on the results, many customer experience developers intend to continue investing in human-centered development activities. When asked about the top activities, the respondents again mention the Promotion of a customer-centered corporate culture, as well as Employee communication and employee engagement. The number one activity in this round, however, revolves around data. During the next 12 months, 77% of the respondents intend to develop the Analysis and monitoring of customer data in the same way as Fennia. The next most popular development activities are Customer-focused corporate culture (73%) and Employee communication and employee engagement (70%). Almost as many plan to develop Customer experience journey mapping (69%) as well as Customer experience measurement and monitoring (68%).

“Management based on customer information is the order of the day. We are living in challenging and at the same time very interesting times, when customer experience people must also be able to validate the results of their work with financial measures. Therefore, the value of data continues to grow. We are already able to utilise the customer understanding gained from listening to customers with modern tools, for example in sales forecasting and building risk and potential forecast models. CX metrics play an important role in various projections. In the best case, we will be able to understand the customers better and plan operations based on verifiable facts”, explains Pihlaja.

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With the help of this study, the current state of customer experience management (CEM, Customer Experience Management) was mapped in Finland and around the world.

The participating organisations were evaluated against the Shirute Customer Experience Management Index™ to understand the level of CEM maturity. This index measures, e.g. how systematic and goal-oriented the activities are, how well the respondents are organising themselves, how much they co-ordinate their various CX development projects, how customer experiences are measured, and how much they invest or plan to invest in customer experience management.

It is important to notice that the index evaluates only how systematic the intentions of the participants are, as reported by themselves. It does not take a stand as to the content of the customer experiences, nor their quality from the point of view of customers, i.e. the results of the CEM activities. This aspect can be measured with other indexes that are based on exercises such as focus group interviews, customer journey mapping or audits in various CEM competency areas.

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The data was gathered through an online form and phone interviews in May-December.

The target group consisted of top 500 companies, public administration and the most famous brands in Finland and around the world. Altogether, 99 CX professionals from 84 organisations from over 30 different industries participated. A third (32%) of these organisations average a turnover of more than 100 million euros, and a half (50%) over 20 million. A good third of them (35%) have over 1 000 employees.

The CEM 2023 Benchmark is the most comprehensive study evaluating the CEM capabilities and competences of international and Finnish organisations. CXPA Finland and Shirute have been studying the current state of CEM in Finland since 2013. The study was originally based on research by Temkin Group. This year, it was conducted internationally, and for the10th time on the Finnish level.

The study has been conducted for the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) Finnish local network by the customer experience agency Shirute (www.shirute.fi). CXPA Finland and Shirute are also partnering with Surveypal, CX Magazine, CX Network ja Women in CX.

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CXPA Finland (CXPA.fi) is the local network of the international, non-profit Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA.org) network in Finland. We operate as a community of customer experience management professionals. Our goal is to get companies to offer even better customer experiences and increase their success. We regularly organize exciting events and business cooperation related to the theme. Our activities are based on volunteer work and corporate donations.

The Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA.org) is an international, non-profit umbrella organization for anyone interested in managing and developing customer experiences. There are currently more than 4,000 members in 80 countries, most of them in the United States and the United Kingdom. The founders of CXPA are Bruce Temkin, former head of Forrester’s Customer Experience, and Jeanne Bliss, a veteran customer experience management consultant. Activities at the local level are the responsibility of active members of the CXPA.

Shirute (shirute.fi) is Finland’s first design agency focusing on customer experience management. Customer Experience Path® is a registered trademark of Shirute. We are a founding member of the international CXPA (Customer Experience Professionals Association).