HP research indicates misalignment between marketing and IT

• Organisations embrace mobile apps but challenge is to deliver superior user experiences
• Only 31% of companies have in-house development teams that are well-versed in UX issues

HEWLETT-Packard (HP) has released global research that it said reveals chief marketing officers (CMOs) understand that technology is driving customer satisfaction, but more than half are not leveraging the latest technologies and application design solutions to deliver high-quality user experiences.
 
User expectations for mobile applications are rapidly rising. As these applications become the face of an organisation, they need to be highly intuitive, intelligent and add value to users’ daily lives, HP said in a statement.
 
Applications that fall short of these high standards will quickly fail, negatively impacting an organisation’s credibility and customer loyalty, the company said.
 
According to the HP CMO Study conducted by Coleman Parkes Research Ltd, more than two-thirds of companies reported leveraging mobile applications to improve customer loyalty, but 78% indicated that they could be more customer-friendly.
 
At the same time, only 31% of companies have in-house applications development teams that are well-versed in user experience issues.
 
This means that a large majority of companies need to partner with experts who have the skills to create innovative, quality customer-facing applications, HP said.
 
“While today’s CMOs recognise that applications are a key driver for customer acquisition, engagement and retention, most application portfolios were built to run an organisation, not differentiate it,” said Lim Bee Wah (pic), country general manager of enterprise services at Hewlett-Packard Malaysia.
 
“Our research confirms that a majority of companies aren’t using the right application design solutions to help provide their customers the superb user experiences they seek,” she said.
 
While CMOs understand the importance of improving customer satisfaction through user experience, the results of this study underscore the challenges companies face when delivering the high-quality user experience customers desire.
 
Highlights of the study include:

• 45% of respondents do not believe they currently deliver an acceptable level of customer satisfaction, but one in two believes that the role of technology in delivering an enhanced user experience will increase in the future.

• Less than half of CMOs believe that they already deliver a very high-quality user experience that leverages the latest technology, and 65% report that they do not feel that they exploit technology to the fullest to enhance users’ experiences.

• Nearly half of companies currently do not build applications with a strong user-experience focus.

• 80% of companies reported that they will need one or more user-experience-focused applications in the next 12 months, with more than half expecting to need at least two to three in next year.

• 56% of companies recognise that marketing and IT should be aligned, yet more than one-fifth feel the collaboration between their companies' marketing and IT departments is weak or very weak.

The Coleman Parkes Research study was conducted by Coleman Parkes Research on behalf of HP and comprised 400 interviews among CMOs or an equivalent, 75% within enterprise-level companies (more than 1,000 local employees) and the rest in the mid-market (defined as organisation with 500 to 1,000 employees locally).
 
The interviews were conducted via phone in February and March 2013. Regions included North America, Europe and the Middle East and Asia Pacific.
 
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