CX-as-a-Service (CXaaS) offers a flexible approach to customer experience that removes the IT burden & puts program ownership with marketing, sales & service.
Customer experiences evolve every day. New technologies, changing consumer expectations and shifting business priorities keep marketing, sales, and customer service leaders on their toes to stay ahead of customer trends and enable digital transformation. These experiences cross business units and budgets, requiring a holistic and nimble approach to serve customers. Yet too often, CX implementations—such as CRM, email marketing, customer service automation, channel strategy and others—default to legacy projects led by IT that may take years to launch, let alone show quick ROI.
In today’s digital age, speed is essential and customer experience is the differentiator.
Rather than stick to the old way of doing business, progressive firms are creating innovative, flexible customer experiences at scale and budget with speed. Customer Experience-as-a-Service (CXaaS) is an end-to-end managed services approach that combines CX strategy, technology innovation, data integration, automation, and employee expertise to quickly develop and expand customer-centric initiatives.
Companies across the CX marketplace are forming partnerships to enable a cloud-based suite of CX services based on customer outcomes, not internal effort. They are working with like-minded brands to offer a flexible approach across the customer journey that removes the IT burden and focuses attention where it belongs – with business owners in marketing, sales, and service.
I know what you’re thinking—this sounds like just another technology that slapped an “as a service” at the end of it. But CXaaS is much more than a buzzword. It reduces the risk from technology investments by replacing giant technology infrastructure with a flexible cloud-based platform. Services can be ramped up or down depending on the need with a mix of optimization, automation, analytics, and continuous improvement. It is the backbone of true digital transformation.
More than a technology refresh, CXaaS enables a foundational and cultural shift to digital, driven by innovation.
It reimagines how a customer experience should be thought of, delivered, and paid for. It is not only the backbone but also the launchpad of true digital transformation around the customer that produces ROI.
With CXaaS, IT aligns with the business and CX partners to continuously make improvements across all facets of the customer experience that build on one another. As gains are realized, cost savings from each incremental improvement gets invested in further optimization. Here’s how it works:
- Create a CX roadmap to optimize customer interactions. Find quick wins for efficiency and optimization to create a more seamless customer experience with less effort. Unique to each program, examples may include:
- Prioritize customer segments for personalized outreach
- Bots to assist customer-facing employees
- RPA to automate simple customer and employee tasks
- Mobile messaging as a customer contact option
- Analytics to gather insights for continuous improvement
Each one of these solutions reduces costs and improves efficiency on CX programs. Together, they create an immovable foundation based on data to understand what customers need and how they behave when they interact with a brand. The information generated from these digital optimizations reveals hidden insights to inform even further CX improvements.
- Act on insights to enhance customer experiences. With insights now in hand, prioritize initiatives to enable customer self-service, automated chatbots and proactive notifications. These tactics will reduce calls and dependence on human labor while improving customer interactions and further improving the customer experience. Here is where cost to serve can be dramatically reduced by enabling automation and streamlining customer projects based on their propensity to deliver results.
- Become future-ready across the organization. Building off the prior two phases, expand to other customer-facing business units to activate transformation across customer channels throughout the lifecycle. This phase is more aspirational – what would an ideal customer experience be, and how do we get there? Using an agile model, don’t commit more than 12 months ahead, since customer and business environments are rapidly evolving. Common investments include:
- Web & app optimization
- Proactive channel orchestration
- Advanced CX marketing & sales analytics
- Personalization services cloud
A CXaaS model provides the flexible structure that’s needed in today’s risk-averse business climate to deliver digital transformation and positively impact the entire customer journey without placing a heavy burden on IT or straining budgets beyond what’s already allotted.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nick Cerise, Chief Marketing Officer at TTEC
Nick Cerise is the Chief Marketing Officer at TTEC, a leading Customer Experience as a Service (CXaaS) provider to many of the world’s most iconic and disruptive brands.