A CX perspective on the Contact Centre

Automation, AI and the transition to a new era

Customer experience is far too important to be left only to the digital marketing specialists. Yes, getting customer experience (CX) right for your online presence is essential, but it is only one part of a far bigger picture.

Indeed, CX spans your entire organisation. Research and development? There’s not much point designing products that customers will dislike using and have a bad time with. Aftercare? If users can’t get good support and advice, or if they are frustrated because the product can’t readily be repaired, reused or recycled, then again, that is bad CX.

And the visibility of CX is today greater than ever, thanks to a society that is interconnected via social media, online review websites and so on. Engaging with customers has therefore become a complex, technology-empowered task – one which is a crucial part of modern CX, and which increasingly demands the involvement of IT leaders.

So we asked 50 CIOs how can businesses build better CX, and where should their customer-facing efforts be focused? How do today’s customers want or expect to make contact with companies, and perhaps more importantly, what do they not want?

Key research findings

From call logging and email through websites and mobile apps to social media and AI, technology is a key enabler of an organisation’s CX.
Driving better CX means removing process disjoints and inconsistencies, and enabling customer-facing staff to respond faster and more effectively.
Traditional contact centre technologies such as phone, email, text and chat remain very popular, and offer significant opportunities for enhancement.
Significant opportunities exist to use AI-type technologies to assist and guide both customers and agents, and to achieve faster issue resolution.
However, there is considerable caution about AI directly interacting with customers, so its usage may need to be behind the scenes and not obvious

Download the Research Report to read more…

Bryan Betts

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Bryan is a technology enthusiast and industry veteran. He has been analysing, explaining and writing about IT and business in a highly engaging manner for around three decades. His experience spans the early days of minicomputers and PC technology, through the emergence of cellular data and smart mobile devices, to the latest developments of the software-defined age in which we all live today. Over his career, Bryan has seen at first-hand how IT changes the world – and how the world changes IT – and he brings that extensive insight to his role as an industry analyst.