Today, contact centers need to deliver superior customer experiences while minimizing operational costs. To deliver this vital customer service engine, you must design a business result aligned strategy, choose the right technology partners, and leverage customer data and analytics for decision making. Making these improvements involves a long list of hard choices and challenges.
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Learn MoreSoftware providers have identified “openness” as a key consideration for contact center buyers. Since there is no generally accepted rule about what makes a system open, it makes sense for us to examine what components contribute to that quality, and why it should be thought of as a good thing.
Within the rapidly developing and changing realm of customer service, advanced enterprise contact centers delivering superlative CX play a crucial role in ensuring customer satisfaction and improving business outcomes. These centers serve as the central hub for customer interactions, utilizing a mix of technology and human interaction to efficiently address customer needs. The incorporation of advanced technologies such as AI, generative AI (GenAI), ML and cloud-based solutions has transformed the operations of contact centers, making them highly agile, adaptable and capable of providing appropriate and personalized CX.
Overall BPO growth, which includes customer experience and other back-office operations, remained flat at $5.6 billion in the first half of 2024 compared to 1H2023. Interestingly, the number of awards – 457 – was higher in 1H2024 than the 403 in 2023. This is a strong indicator that the demand in the market is intact. However, deal sizes have been reduced.
Self-service has changed immensely in recent years. It has gotten better, qualitatively, in delivering answers and resolutions to customers. But it has also gotten extremely complex, relying on a basket of new technologies to achieve results. It helps to look at it through the eyes of the three main constituencies that are affected by it: customers, contact centers and the businesses they sit in.
Field service operations are not often discussed as part of enterprise customer experience planning, but there is a strong argument that they should be seen as an important factor driving how customers perceive brands. Like contact centers, field service teams are dealing with the advance of startling new technologies that can be expensive and disruptive. The flip side of disruption, though, is that it presents interesting opportunities for improving customer-related outcomes.
With more B2B enterprises looking to provide access in a timely manner and when and where the customer chooses, digital commerce is a growing part of the overall customer experience. It is safe to say that in B2B commerce, the Amazon effect also applies, in that customers expect a similar level of frictionless automation, immediacy and simplicity in operation. But, as I will discuss, there are significant differences between B2B and B2C around individuality in pricing, more complex product sets and payment terms.
The environment around customer experience is being disrupted by a series of technical and organizational shifts ranging from artificial intelligence to work-from-home to deep customer analytics. When times change, it’s helpful for people to have a framework to organize their thinking and actions. I believe there are two dominant frameworks used to organize business approaches to customers. One is rooted in the efficiency of the contact center (let’s call it “CC thinking”), and the more marketing-centric framework is based on maximizing customer value (for argument’s sake, “CX thinking”).
