UCaaS

CX Strategies to Win in the Experience Economy

March 25, 2019

Article by ATI partner Gayathri Krishnamurthy of Nice inContact

We are entering an experience economy where exceptional customer experience (CX) is a true competitive differentiator; more than product and price. Today’s customers are not just looking to get assistance, they are looking for an experience that is immersive, engaging and proactive. With exceptional CX, customers stay longer with the brand, buy more and bring more customers via word of mouth, all resulting in a direct revenue uplift. But what does it take to go from where you are now to delivering CX your customers expect?

Here are four simple steps for transforming your CX:

1. Set a CX goal; work on incremental and continuous improvements

Improving CX is an iterative and incremental process. Start by envisioning your goal; what best in class looks like, and then follow a maturity model to move one step at a time. Contact center is definitely a critical piece in achieving CX since it facilitates and impacts customer interactions across the buyer journey.

2. Orchestrate people, process and technology within the contact center

Focus on the prime CX influence; contact center. Delivering exceptional CX involves aligning key aspects pertinent to contact center—agents, customers and real-time operations. Create personalized experiences across channels that matter the most for your customers. Happy agents make happy customers. Ensure agents are engaged and empowered with the right tools and that there is a continuous measurement and monitoring of customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and KPIs to drive correlated actions and next steps as it relates to CX.

Lastly, think about the right technology platform that can help achieve these with ease.

3. Build for the future

• Choose a technology to build for the future, one that is open, extensible and scalable. Cloud native outweighs other cloud options here.
• Designed for scalability and agility, companies can quickly adjust to changing customer needs in real-time without expensive, complex upgrades to an on-premises solution
• Open architecture provides flexibility and future-proofs your technology investment.
• Open application programming interfaces (APIs) enable easy application extensions, spurring innovation and driving business success

4. Build a business case to invest more in contact centers

Today’s contact center executives have a larger role to play in driving revenue and market share, not just optimizing costs. Contact center remains the epicenter for customer interactions, all through the customer journey from awareness, purchase, service and advocacy. Build a strong business case for investment in a robust contact center and quantify values of CX improvement through automation, migration to new technology and better KPI all of which not just drives costs downs but improves CX. Improving CX is not a big bang approach. It involves continuous planning with incremental improvements focusing on your frontline employees, customers, effective operations, right processes and technologies. A future-proof cloud native CX platform proves to be a critical and foundational element in achieving and exceeding your CX goals. NICE inContact is the cloud contact center leader with the world’s #1 cloud customer experience platform, CXone.

Article by ATI partner Gayathri Krishnamurthy of Nice inContact

Learn more about a Contact Center deep dive analysis here.

Tags: Contact Centers, Customer Experience, InContact