When asked which technologies will most improve the customer experience, nearly 40% of sales and marketing leaders cited Virtual Reality (VR) and 34% believe Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be the biggest game-changer.

More than three quarters ( 78%) of brands say they have already implemented, or are planning to implement, AI and VR by 2020 to better serve customers.

When it comes to chatbots – one of the most recognisable form of AI – 80% of sales and marketing leaders say they already use these in their CX or plan to do so by 2020.

Daryn Mason, senior director, CX applications, Oracle, said: “Few people welcome the barrage of messages being pushed at them online, but that does not mean they wish to block them all. Consumers and B2B decision-makers simply want relevant content at the right time – that is the promise of AI.

“By 2020, the customer experience will largely be defined by two-way discussions between ‘intelligent’ software rather than by a unidirectional flow of promotional content.”

But despite citing customer satisfaction data as the most important information source when building a customer profile, 41% of brands say it is also the hardest data to compile and factor into their analyses. To add to this, 38% of sales and marketing leaders struggle to make use of data related to customers’ purchasing history, loyalty, or social media activity.

Forty-eight percent of sales and marketing leaders admit that digital and mobile technologies have caused the greatest change to how their customers and prospects interact with them.

Oracle teamed up with Coleman Parkes Research for the report research. It was conducted in October 2016 among 800 CMOs, CSOs, senior marketers and senior sales executives across France, the Netherlands, South Africa and the UK. Respondents were also evenly split between three industries: manufacturing and high-tech engineering, online retail, and telecommunications.