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It’s getting to be that time of year again – budget season. Forrester’s 2023 Planning Guide offers this not-so-shocking advice. “Those who come out on top in 2023 will prioritize investments that maximize revenue growth, profitability, and resilience while cutting spending in areas prone to waste.” We all try to do that every year, so what’s different about 2023?
Market turbulence caused by global unrest, ongoing supply chain instability, soaring inflation, and the long shadow of the pandemic are all pointing to an economic slowdown. At the same time, many business leaders are optimistic about increasing spending on people, skills and technology. The key to doing this right will be discipline and precision to prioritize investments that increase customer value.
Forrester recommends increasing spending in four areas:
- Customer insights and engagement: customer analytics, experience research platforms and recalibrated post-sale messaging
- Technologies that improve customer experience and reduce costs: cloud optimization, robotic process automation and intelligent agent apps
- Security: cybersecurity solutions, security awareness training, crisis management plans
- Talent and productivity: talent acquisition, coaching and sales productivity tools
Areas where you can cut waste and save budget include:
- Underperforming markets and customers: expensive programs for low-potential customers
- Low-quality data and innovation outsourcing: unneeded third-party data partners and digital innovation outsourcing
- Technical debt: legacy investments, duplicative or underutilized tools
- Unneeded software contracts: duplicative contracts and inactive seats
Finally, Forrester recommends selectively experimenting with emerging technologies to create competitive differentiation. These include:
- Edge intelligence that brings analytics directly to the customer and generates personalized interactions
- Intelligent agents (IAs) like bots, chatbots, or digital workers that make experiences more human
- Extended reality, the metaverse, and Web3 that offer immersive experiences, both for consumer-facing purposes to open doors to new audiences and employee-facing experiments to drive collaboration, remote assistance, training, and onboarding
- Privacy preserving technologies (PPTs) that protect data to satisfy privacy, ethics, and other regulatory requirements
Budgeting is always a balancing act, and 2023 is no different in that regard. If we can help you with recommendations on technology upgrades or adjustments, please reach out to the team at Ecessa and JDL Technologies. We’d love to assist.
You can find the Forrester report at https://go.forrester.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Forrester-2023-Planning-Isnt-Business-As-Usual.pdf