You’ve heard of CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) and UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) but have you heard of CXaaS?
The concept of Customer Experience as a Service (CXaaS) has been rising in popularity in recent years as customer expectations are growing, budgets are shrinking and return on investment (ROI) is required.
Tech and CX leaders are looking for innovative ways to deliver a best-in-class customer experience that delivers tangible business outcomes. These outcomes cannot be achieved through technology alone.
Where CCaaS and UCaaS (or any “aaS” for that matter) are generally a way to buy technology, CXaaS delivers a managed strategic approach to deploying and managing that technology and the people to support customer engagement to ultimately drive results.
Simply stated, CXaaS is an end-to-end approach to Customer Experience which includes the PEOPLE, PROCESSES and TECHNOLOGY required to ensure success. It begins with strategy, planning and selection and ends with professional implementation and ongoing management.
The Business Case for CXaaS
Many organizations struggle to demonstrate the ROI of their CX programs. A Forrester report found that 54% of CX decision-makers couldn’t prove the ROI of their projects.
Why? Contact center and CX projects don’t generally fail because of the people or technology. Instead, failures result from not having a clear strategy, and an inability to implement and manage in a way that ties CX to topline business objectives.
In the current climate, organizations can’t afford to have their CX projects deliver subpar results. Customers expect to start their journey digitally, and CX differentiation is expected to erode in 75% of industries in 2023.
According to Forrester’s 2023 CX predictions, companies must “embrace customer obsession and pursue CX innovations that differentiate their brand rather than relying on CX strategies that consumers perceive as similar.”
CXaaS offers a way for brands to get an edge in a market that’s quickly shifting. It goes beyond the technology powering digital transformation and layers in services to create amazing, ever-evolving experiences for customers.
CXaaS: Taking a Strategy First Approach to Inform Your CX Design
Today’s customers expect to start their journey digitally, so CX leaders have been focused on implementing technology to make that possible. While technology is a critical component of every successful CX project, the strategy must dictate tech decisions and not the other way around.
The focus is often on changing platforms not on a strategic approach to overall CX design. Your strategy needs to meet today’s needs and consider what the organization needs in the future.
With that in mind, a CXaaS strategy should answer the following:
What are you trying to accomplish and why?
What have you tried in the past? What did and didn’t work?
What are your pain points? Are you meeting your customers where they want to meet you?
What are your measures of success?
How will CX success lead to the business outcomes that executives expect?
Are the key stakeholders aligned?
Ideally, the strategy should focus on the entire CX lifecycle, including a clear path to ROI. CX Strategy Consulting services can help a business to take a step back and reconsider their complete CX journey or can be leveraged to solve a specific problem.
In every case, the idea is to “begin with the end in mind”. By putting strategy first, organizations have a roadmap to ensure CX projects and ongoing operations deliver happy customers.
People and Processes: Bringing Expertise and Driving Efficiency
Next, CXaaS focuses on the people and processes needed to support the strategy.
Well-planned and capable CX technologies mean little without the people to use them. Too often, CX leaders rely on technology capabilities to improve their outcomes without considering staffing strategies.
Process, workforce planning and optimization, training, and outsourcing strategies are critical components of your “people plan”.
CX consultants, such as Bridgepointe’s PPT (People, Process and Technology) team, bring a diverse background and experience to designing and/or leading CX and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) projects — including the people to run and staff them.
As budgets are seeing pressure in 2023, every successful CX strategy should include outsourcing to reduce overall costs and ensure scalability of CX operations. Unfortunately, outsourcing customer-facing personnel sometimes gets a bad rap, which is the result of it not being done properly.
Outsourcing is both art and science and requires outside help to get it right. From people strategy and sourcing and understanding the implications of onshore, near shore and offshore staffing models, outsourcing is not to be taken lightly.
CX Technology: Implementation and Management
When deploying CX technology, you need a strategic plan that ensures you’re not just enhancing the customer journey but being an innovator in your market.
To do that, CXaaS focuses on aligning technology investments with the strategy and the services required to implement and manage those solutions.
New solutions designed to support customer self-service require careful implementation and integration into back-office systems. For example, bot technologies can be helpful in guiding customer choices but must be informed by well-designed internal processes and documentation.
Also, new agent tools can improve the agent experience and lead to happy customers, but only if they are properly rolled out, trained and launched with no disruption to the team or customers.
Once the tech is in place, managed services help ensure that day-to-day operations are fully aligned with the overall strategy. This typically includes operational support, infrastructure management and day-to-day operational management of Workforce Optimization (WFO), Interactive Voice Response (IVR), and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions.
Get Unrivalled Results with CXaaS
To compete in a market where customer expectations are higher than ever, and brand differentiation is eroding, CXaaS offers a proven framework to deliver unrivalled results across all of your CX programs.
When choosing new technologies and programs to support or improve your CX, look past the technology to consider the strategy, people and processes needed to create measurable business outcomes.
Bridgepointe’s PPT Solutions team focuses exclusively on customer experience, with decades of experience supporting the world’s most admired brands, both in-house and as consultants.
Contact us today to learn more about shifting your CX programs and technologies to a CXaaS model, contact us here
- What is CXaaS? - March 16, 2023