How to update your CX stack in 2023

Customer expectations are evolving, and businesses are struggling to keep up.

According to reports, around 73% of customer support leaders agree that customers expectations are higher than ever, but only 42% believe they’re living up to demands. In an environment where clients are used to fast, efficient, and personalized service on every channel, it can be difficult to keep up.

Fortunately, the evolving technology landscape means companies do have a range of ways they can boost their chances of CX success. There are countless tools designed to help businesses track and respond to customer needs, from CCaaS platforms to AI-enhanced service tools.

The challenge is in figuring out how to update your CX stack in 2023.

Here are some tips to get you started.

Step 1: Switch to the Cloud

First, for any business to keep up with the changing expectations of their customer in today’s transformative landscape, they need a platform for customer experience that’s flexible and agile. The cloud environment gives brands endless opportunities to add new functionality to their contact centers, service desks, and CRM tools, without a huge initial investment.

Transitioning to the cloud with a CCaaS (Contact Centre as a Service) platform also ensures business leaders can continue to support hybrid and remote workers in an environment where more service professionals are working outside of the office. Once you’ve brought your Contact Center technology into the cloud, you can begin thinking about aligning different cloud environments.

For instance, you might connect your CCaaS tools with your UCaaS environment, so you can give your employees an effective way to communicate and collaborate when solving customer problems. Or you could link your contact center to other SaaS tools, like CRM platforms and ERP technology.

Step 2: Analyze Your Customers

Once you’ve switched into a flexible cloud environment, it’s easy to start implementing new and innovative CX tools into your stack. However, before you start making any investments, you’ll first need to take a closer look at your target audience.

Analyzing your customers, their buying journeys, and how they prefer to interact with your company will give you a clear view of where you should be focusing your attention. Ask yourself whether you need to add new platforms like SMS and chat to your contact center so you can meet your audience wherever they are. Decide whether a deeper investment into self-service will help you to reduce the number of calls your agents need to handle each day.

To make the right decisions, you’ll need to invest in analytical tools which help you to track, and monitor the customer journey, gather feedback from customers, and assess the competition. These tools will be crucial not only for deciding which tools to implement, but also for helping you to monitor the return on investment from each of your new strategies.

Step 3: Look Beyond CX

Customer Experience is one of the most important elements for any business to focus on if they want to ensure ongoing success. However, in order to deliver an amazing customer experience, organizations first need to ensure they’ve empowered their workforce.

When implementing a new CX strategy, ask yourself how you can create a more engaging and productive experience for the agents who are going to be dealing with customer concerns. You might start by adding collaboration tools into the contact center, to help align and synchronize your staff. Or you could look into using virtual assistants to provide agents with intelligent guidance.

In some cases, businesses find they get the best results from their teams when they look for ways to reduce their workload, with automated tools for self-service. The more problems customers can solve on their own, the less your agents will be overwhelmed by excessive calls. This gives them more time to focus on delivering a great experience.

Step 4: Evaluate CX Opportunities

Once you’ve built a platform for excellent employee experience, you can begin to invest in new strategies to improve the overall customer experience. This is where you can really start to look into the benefits offered by innovative and pioneering tools.

The CX opportunities you focus on should be inspired by your goals for improving customer service and satisfaction. For instance, if you want to improve your call handling times, you could use virtual assistants to help with routing calls to the right agents, and providing employees with relevant information during a conversation.

If you’re trying to deliver more personalized and engaging experiences to customers, you could leverage AI to give agents suggestions about how to serve a customer based on their previous experiences. You can even improve your insights into your customer journey map and your client’s key pain points with sentiment and conversational analysis. Or you could use historical analytics and monitoring to build a proactive strategy for outbound customer support.

Step 5: Choose Your CX Solutions

Finally, you’ll be ready to start implementing your CX strategies. Remember, during this period of your technology update, it’s crucial to ensure every new tool you add to your stack follows the same security and compliance standards you have in place for your entire team. Interact with the brands and vendors you’re going to be buying from to find out more about their security standing.

At the same time, make sure you have a strategy in place for constantly monitoring your return on investment. You should be able to actively measure the impact each new technology is having on metrics like customer satisfaction score, and retention.

Need help choosing the right CX upgrade? Contact Primetel today for expert advice.