The complexity of delivering exceptional and consistent customer experiences (CX) is intensifying due to growing interaction volume across many channels.
Unchecked, it makes the management and operation of exceeding customer expectations and empowering employee productivity extremely difficult, if not impossible.
This can lead to a severe drop in customer satisfaction. According to NICE research, 95% of consumers say that customer service impacts brand loyalty, and 44% will abandon a brand after just two bad service interactions. Why risk that?
One of the primary problems is complex, disparate, and siloed tech stacks. They can act as dead weight, dragging down efficiency and hindering innovation.
Leveraging cloud CX technology specifically designed to support CX with as few components as possible has become the most viable option for many leading organizations.
Cloud CX can enable consolidation and scaling of technology, directly impacting your organization’s entire CX strategy and helping provide a consistent experience for your customers, employees, and your brand. But there’s much more involved than just using the right tools.
In this article, Jennifer Wilson at NICE discusses proven steps to reduce complexities in your CX through streamlining and consolidating your technology, and how technology is just part of an overall holistic approach to simpler, consistent CX called customer experience interactions (CXi).
How Disconnected Tech and Interactions Lead to Complex CX
Antiquated tech stacks are spurring the need for consolidation. These stacks are many times the result of acquisitions, legacy implementations, and one-off solutions tied to a specific business need or use case.
Siloed tech within the organization also encourages departmental implementations of different solutions, further complicating tech stacks.
Outdated systems and silos put CX initiatives and innovation at risk. They naturally result in a lack of synergy and transparency between departments when it comes to not only decision making, but also the sharing of data and consistency in experiences for employees.
As digital offerings grow, the ability to successfully manage these channels can prove difficult when not handled in a unified manner.
This can lead to complexities that limit your ability to provide a consistent and fluent experience for employees and subsequently customers.
Also, when data points aren’t easily accessible and data is disconnected, integrations and fluid implementations are hard to make a reality.
Over time, these implementations can create evolving challenges as they grow, resulting in unnecessary costs and efforts to maintain solutions.
Those solutions may then end up abandoned, which leads to more complexity, as well as disconnected resources and operations.
Consolidation Driver #1: Leveraging Optimized Technology Designed for CX
How do you simplify CX complexity and make it consistent? Start by looking at operational efficiencies by working with key stakeholders throughout your organization to help identify CX targets, requirements, and areas for improvement.
Next, audit your existing tech stack to ensure it’s aligned with your company’s goals and budget. Is it delivering the most business value?
Is it meeting your objectives efficiently and cost-effectively? Does it consist of the most capable components available that operate at the highest possible level?
Much of that can be determined by assessing your vendor relationships. Multiple vendors supplying different applications can result in tech that is not only difficult to maintain and integrate, but also expensive.
This is particularly true as you expand to provide more digital channels to customers, especially if the tech isn’t dedicated to CX.
If your software isn’t up to spec, start researching more effective options on the market. Dedicated cloud CX platforms offer more complete solutions that are designed for one purpose, to drive CX performance through seamless integration between all CX applications, allowing more efficiency, effectiveness, and scalability.
For example, a complete, open cloud native management platform is optimal for meeting your CX business goals for growth and effectiveness.
Combined with AI intelligence, it can provide scalability, flexibility, security, and data management, as well as speed to innovation.
Consolidation Driver #2: Delivering a Holistic CX Approach
There’s a new category of enterprise business solutions that transforms the way brands deliver CX called customer experience interactions (CXi).
Unlike traditional CX that focuses only on the contact centre, CXi is a holistic approach that improves every journey by seamlessly managing interactions between your customers, your employees, and your business.
For the customer: They won’t have to navigate a patchwork of disconnected experiences. Instead, they follow an interconnected, frictionless, personalized, and consistent path of least resistance to find the right answer when and where they need it.
For employees: CXi empowers agents to deliver more effective and consistent CX while increasing operational efficiency. This value also extends past the agent to operations and management.
For your brand: CX fluency is ensured by leveraging a more cohesive and complete approach to CX.
CXi helps you stay ahead of the curve to build long-lasting and fruitful relationships by satisfying customers at every step.
From self-service channels to agent-assisted interactions, the experiences are consistent. Eliminating piecemeal delivery reduces disparity across various customer journeys, independent of the channels and touchpoints.
Additionally, complete visibility and analysis of these journeys helps operations and management identify where performance is lacking or inconsistent.
Consolidation Driver #3: Creating the Broader Business Value
There’s a proven return in investment for companies dedicated to delivering superior customer experiences.
Investing in CXi management and cloud CX-centric technology improves customer satisfaction and retention. It also drives increased revenue by reaching more consumers and boosting customer lifetime value.
Simplifying technology implementations and modernizing can lead to a more consistent approach across the entire organization and not just limited to the contact centre or centralized CX.
While consolidation is a broad term and can mean different things to different organizations, your primary goal should be innovating and delivering consistent experiences through simplification… and that impact may be felt across your organization.
This isn’t something that’s put into effect overnight. It will require planning and prioritization, but by focusing on making this change for the benefit of the broader operation, clearly identifying and communicating these goals and benefits can create easier buy-in and assistance from company executives and your organization as a whole.
Implement a Scalable, Cohesive Approach to CXi
Solving for CXi requires a completely fluent ecosystem. Overcomplicated solutions limit the ability to implement innovative approaches to CX like AI and analytics.
Cloud native CX technology is facilitating this change by providing a more scalable, cohesive approach to CX strategies.
With a platform, it’s never been easier for organizations of all sizes to implement CXi while meeting key business metrics by managing extraordinary CX.
It offers a complete set of CX applications all on one open cloud platform. It also unifies data and insights across every interaction and application. Plus, it delivers real-time insights so you can take immediate action from the start.
It is tailor-made for providing streamlined, consistent CX across your organization:
- End-to-end customer journey management and operations
- Connected CX applications and unified data layers
- Built-in cloud scalability for CX operations
- Ready-to-go AI purpose-built for CX
- Accelerated innovation and continuous improvement
- Improved agent performance, engagement, and work-life balance
- Unparalleled security and reliability
Deliver effortless experiences that create lasting customer relationships and enable greater business outcomes than ever before.
This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of NICE – View the Original Article
For more information about NICE - visit the NICE Website
About NICE
NICE is a leading global enterprise software provider that enables organizations to improve customer experience and business results, ensure compliance and fight financial crime. Their mission is to help customers build and strengthen their reputation by uncovering customer insight, predicting human intent and taking the right action to improve their business. Find out more about NICE
Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.
Author: NICE
Published On: 18th Jan 2024
Read more about - Guest Blogs, CX, NICE
