UK Business Says It’s Good to Go with Experience Management, But Brexit and Coronavirus May Derail Plans

• Research shows majority of UK firms are successfully collecting experience data from their stakeholders, in particular employees
• But businesses are struggling with multiple obstacles, as well as the challenges of Brexit and Coronavirus

Bury St Edmunds, May 12, 2020 - New survey findings on the status of digital transformation and experience management in the UK highlight multiple challenges plaguing on-going digitisation on customer and other key stakeholder experience efforts —but also show a reassuring level of digital maturity.

The research has been released by EASY Software, Europe’s foremost supplier of document management solutions, and displays a high level of digitisation success. When we asked about businesses’ satisfaction with how well they are using IT to manage end-to-end processes that start and end with the customer, the majority claimed to be ‘completely’ or ‘somewhat’ digitised (83%). Challenges to digitisation are budgetary (47%), complex or rigid legacy IT (39%) and lack of management understanding/support (38%).

The research shows that the majority of UK firms are doing well in terms of capturing experience data, namely employee and other key partner and employee stakeholder sentiment. There is mature use of 360-degree-style overview of stakeholders by the majority of UK businesses who regularly collect experience-related data (76%). In fact, the main group which UK businesses now poll data from is the employee (60%) reflecting the importance placed on retaining talent, addressing productivity gaps and meeting growing workplace expectations from younger demographics.

This is important, say respondents, as using experience data means businesses can interact better with customers, employees and partners (84%) while applying experience data to optimise operations was identified as a KPI by a similarly high proportion (82%). When asked about the perceived greatest advantage of a 360-degree approach, responses included, “You should collect data in order to improve your services both for customers and staff as companies can get a tunnel vision,” and, “To tailor our procedures to give a bespoke experience to our customers, suppliers and our staff (all the better to retain the best qualified staff)”.

The major challenges confronting those responsible for experience data collection were identified as:

• Multiple regulatory problems, e.g. data protection and the on-going impact of GDPR (35%)
• IT Infrastructure, systems and tools being missing or insufficiently developed (31%)
• Poor data quality (29%).

External factors are clearly weighing on the UK c-suite. Asked about what they see as their greatest challenges over the next 12 months, respondents list the aftermath of Brexit (65%), the impact of coronavirus (49%) and cybersecurity threats/data breaches (47%) as their top three worries. On how vulnerable they are to losing customers from these challenges, businesses are not strongly pessimistic, but are worried nonetheless (45% are somewhat concerned, 17% are very concerned).

EASY Software UK’s CEO Andy Boulton believes that the survey demonstrates the UK’s increasing comfort levels with experience data, despite the challenges, immediate and wider:

“This survey has highlighted the fact that for UK firms, experience management is a well understood and utilised concept, despite regulatory challenges, and digitisation is firmly under way despite budgetary constraints,” Boulton states. “Notably, the high number of respondents recording employees as the key source of experience data shows the rise of employee experience in the age of the ‘Glassdoor effect’. But our findings show a challenging business outlook in the UK, given Brexit looming and Coronavirus changing the business climate so dramatically. To keep the digitisation and experience momentum accelerating, some radical process overhaul and technology spend needs to be set in motion.”

About the research

The UK study was conducted online by independent research specialists Censuswide during March 2020, covering middle and senior management in 500-plus companies with at least 100 employees in the Technology, Telecommunications, Finance, Manufacturing and Retail sectors. The full UK survey report is available, register to receive your free copy here

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About EASY Software UK
EASY SOFTWARE, founded in 1990 and listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, is Europe’s foremost provider of integrated document management technologies. With more than 12,800 customers worldwide, global and local companies alike now rely on EASY’s comprehensive suite of scaleable document technologies to automate business processes, improve productivity and boost efficiency, as well as meet increasing regulatory requirements.

EASY promotes its extensive suite of document management solutions both directly and indirectly through a network of 200-plus global sales partners. More than 100 software development companies have created interfaces to EASY ECM Suite™, the company’s flagship solution platform.

EASY SOFTWARE is also a Microsoft Gold Independent Software Vendor (ISV) as well as being the second largest provider of SAP archiving solutions worldwide.

EASY is headquartered in Mülheim a.d. Ruhr, with offices and subsidiaries throughout Germany, Austria, the USA, Singapore, Turkey and the UK. More information on EASY’s UK subsidiary can be found at http://www.easysoftware.co.uk