Customer experience is the new frontier of business differentiation. Eighty-nine percent predicted that by 2016, they will separate themselves from their competition on the basis of customer experience—more so than product and service. A variety of factors influence a customers’ experience with a company, ranging from interactions with an in-store sales clerk, to reading an FAQ page to navigating a company’s website. We are currently seeing businesses invest heavily in customer experience, with Gartner reporting that businesses invested in customer experience more than any other area of marketing in 2014 and are expecting customer experience to lead innovation spending in 2015.
http://multichannelmerchant.com/blog/the-top-6-innovations-in-online-customer-experience/