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The business landscape is quickly evolving, driven by high consumer expectations and breakthrough technical innovations. Organizations that find the right blend of technology enhanced customer experience (CX) can quickly turn that into a competitive advantage. The roles of the CIO and other IT executives have never been more crucial to business success.
In addition to ensuring their IT shops are running smoothly, technology executives are the architects of technical innovation and transformation. Organizations rely on their internal IT leaders to ensure technology investments and priorities align with the business strategies and goals, and that the business is fully leveraging leading edge solutions.
This becomes further complicated when CIOs have to overcome internal barriers such as resistance to change, limited budgets, and diverse stakeholder priorities. CIOs often manage these challenges by nurturing cross-functional collaboration and acting as the bridge between business and technology.
A track record of successful technology projects that produced tangible business results is also a powerful way to align the business on transformative technology initiatives.
In this article we'll explore how strategic customer experience technology can help the business succeed with its CX strategy and help IT leaders like you build momentum for their technology road maps.
Staying ahead of technology trends
Having your finger on the pulse of emerging technology is a key to effectively partnering with your business colleagues, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence and CX platforms. Inflexible legacy systems no longer do the job for contact centers. To compete in today's fast-paced experience economy, they need innovative AI customer platforms that can flex as the business evolves.
Customer experience has become a key component of most organization's business strategies, often displacing product and pricing as the top priority. Brands that consistently deliver exceptional CX can expect benefits that include higher customer loyalty, increased customer lifetime value, and improved revenue. In fact, according to a study conducted by McKinsey, “improving the customer experience has increased sales revenues by 2 to 7 percent and profitability by 1 to 2 percent.”
Such high stakes call for nothing short of digital transformation in customer service. Because customer service can play a significant role in shaping a customer's opinion of a brand, contact centers need solutions that add convenience, accuracy, speed, and personalization to customer interactions. And platforms that are infused with artificial intelligence can deliver all these characteristics while also streamlining operations, enhancing issue management, and increasing agent satisfaction and engagement.
The future of AI in customer experience is here, as technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing, and predictive analytics are commonly found in most leading contact center platforms. AI is used in traditional contact center applications such as interactive voice response (IVR) systems, workforce management, and automatic contact distributors (ACDs) to improve routing, forecasting, and self-service effectiveness.
The capabilities of artificial intelligence have also spawned the creation of entirely new solutions. For example, interaction analytics tools can make sense of all that unstructured customer service interaction data and give contact center leaders useful information about their operations and what customers are encountering as they transact with the business. Additionally, intelligent agent solutions can provide in the moment guidance, proactively deliver relevant information, and suggest best next steps.
Software providers with innovative AI customer platforms, such as NICE CXone, are continually looking for ways to add innovative capabilities to their solutions using the latest advancements in artificial intelligence. Forming a strategic partnership with a company like NICE is an effective way to stay abreast of the most recent developments in customer experience and contact center technology.
Organizations that are on the forefront of adopting strategic customer experience technology can differentiate themselves from competitors by establishing a reputation as a CX leader. Conversely, those that are late to the game may not be able to catch up.
Alignment with the business strategy
Aligning technology investments with the business strategy can be easier said than done. Businesses, especially large ones, can have internal politics and leaders who are territorial about what they view as their team's responsibilities. For example, if you asked ten people in your organization to identify who "owns" CX, would you receive ten identical answers?
To be fair, internal departments often have goals that may unintentionally create competing priorities. This can result in a gridlock that delays decisions about technology investments, and IT executives may find themselves playing the role of moderator in order to keep moving forward with solutions that benefit the entire enterprise.
Compounding the previously described issue is the fact that business strategies can be quite complex. In addition to a customer experience component, strategies usually include elements that consider regulatory compliance, competitive positioning, and market dynamics. This diversity emphasizes the need to select technology, such as a long-term CX solution, with broad capabilities that can be integrated into the technology ecosystem rather than operating in a silo or performing a very narrow set of functions.
When the technology and business strategies are misaligned, that can result in inefficiencies and missed opportunities. Avoiding these pitfalls requires frequent communications and close collaboration with business teams as well as tools and methods such as IT governance, strategic planning frameworks, and business value assessments.
Prototyping and piloting are also effective ways to assess new systems and determine their fit with business objectives. For example, a pilot of strategic customer experience technology could entail testing it at one site (if you have multiple contact centers), implementing a single support channel, implementing a subset of possible applications, or any combination of the three. There are many hands-on ways to get to know the capabilities of new contact center software - NICE even offers a free thirty-day trial of our CXone platform.
NICE CXone - strategic customer experience technology for your organization
Whether your organization is big or small, a public entity or a private business, NICE CXone can be the long-term CX solution that supports your strategic objectives and your technology vision. CXone is a cloud-native CX platform used by organizations in a multitude of industries across the globe for digital transformation in customer service.
The CXone suite of applications includes solutions to manage the entire resolution customer journey, provide customers with consistently superior experiences, streamline operations, and make contact center staff successful through intelligent, easy-to-use tools.
CXone offers a wide breadth of capabilities that include:
Enlighten AI solutions. NICE has been at the forefront of establishing the future of AI in customer experience. Our purpose-built Enlighten AI solutions include smart self-service virtual agents, interaction routing that matches callers to the best available agents, automated note taking, and customer sentiment trend analysis. These capabilities improve CX, streamline operations, and foster data-driven decision-making.
Self-service. In addition to Enlighten Autopilot, our smart, conversational virtual agent, NICE offers self-service tools that include a customer and agent-facing knowledge base and an IVR that leverages natural language processing to provide callers with a more natural and satisfying experience. We also partner with several chatbot providers, and you can even bring your own bot if you're satisfied with it.
Journey orchestration. Our journey orchestration solutions up-level traditional contact center functions such as routing, digital and voice channels, and outbound dialing. This allows our clients to provide their customers with the omnichannel experiences they expect and value.
Workforce engagement management. We've also put our own stamp on common contact center applications that include workforce management, performance management, and quality management. Additional features such as automated agent guidance and augmentation make our workforce engagement management solutions the right tools for managing and motivating agents and creating a culture of high performance.
The NICE CXone Open Cloud Foundation powers rapid innovation with an extensible enterprise-grade platform that scales securely and deploys quickly. CXone is compliant with a multitude of data security standards, including PCI DSS, FedRAMP, and AICPA SOC 2 type 2 + HITRUST.
Our platform includes over 400 APIs for seamless integrations, and if you don't want to do the integrations in house, we have a very active developer community, plus a CXexchange marketplace with over 150 pre-built, pre-tested integrations.
Because we are constantly innovating and incorporating the latest technologies into our platform, CXone can be the long-term CX solution that forms a bridge between your business strategy and technology road map. And because our solutions include capabilities that enhance and elevate the customer experience, your organization could experience benefits such as higher customer loyalty and increased revenue, while also reducing operating costs.
