From a business perspective, lack of timely and accurate insights means they are flying blind and therefore can only deliver disconnected customer and partner experiences which are hampered by long-winded manual processes that are susceptible to errors. Such environments are also only able to deliver slow responses to change which compromises employee productivity. This is compounded by rising operational costs which cannot be offset by revenue and profit growth because outmoded CX systems result in missed opportunities to upsell and cross-sell.
A different, but still as damaging, set of problems hampers organisations’ technological CX capabilities. Many systems are still reliant on siloed data with hard-coded integrations and face the requirement to manage a complex IT estate composed of an excessive number of systems and applications. This results in diminished business and IT agility and IT capabilities that simply don’t align with the needs of the business. Finally, this IT landscape is also too slow to respond to business needs and meet the expectations of customers.
A re-think is needed to enable CX teams to provide the differentiated customer experience their markets now expect. CX can no longer exist in isolation, encapsulated in separate contact centres, service desks or CRM camps. CX should be integrated and aligned with the business so a unified, end-to-end customer experience can be delivered.
That fully integrated employee and customer experience environment may be simple to say, but it’s hard to implement. It traverses the entire business and needs to encompass holistic approaches to employee performance, 360-degree customer insights, self-service enablement, customer on-boarding, omnichannel interactions, personalisation and comprehensive total customer support. Ideally, modern CX should be able to support the entire customer journey with contact centre technologies that encompass cloud, artificial intelligence (AI) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.