Today’s empowered consumers are conditioned to expect instant access to information, goods, and services. This expectation is forcing businesses to reconsider marketing’s exclusive purview over the customer experience, and many are coming to realize that they must instead work to harness the power of critical communications delivery to drive revenue growth and improve consumer satisfaction. Every year, Keypoint Intelligence – InfoTrends conducts primary research on businesses and consumers in the transactional communication market. Our 2018 survey is nearing completion, but this article provides an overview of the key findings from our 2017 study that we expect to play an increasingly important role this year and beyond.

Based on our survey data, the majority of North American businesses (65%) believe that transactional communications play an important role in improving the customer experience. This contention is best reflected in the strategic priorities that enterprises set for transactional communications and the ways that they measure improvements to the overall customer experience.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the highest share of North American enterprises ranked cost reduction as the top objective of their transactional communications strategy, followed by security and regulatory compliance. When the respondents who selected each objective as their first, second, or third most important concern were combined, however, improving the customer experience was cited by the greatest share of enterprises (85%), compared to 83% for security/regulatory compliance, and 76% for cost reduction.