When talking about CX or the customer journey, it’s crucial to remember that it is about much more than individual elements such as the contact center, automated technology and the customer data you collect and analyze to create insights. In fact, integration is the key to delivering business value.
Tech does play a key role in CX
Of course, technology plays an essential role in delivering the CX your customers expect. Your customers are digitally-savvy and expect you to interact with them across the media of their choice. Online interaction has become the favored format for consumers: Microsoft reports that 47% of consumers use social media to make any complaints about a company’s services, for example.
Cloud is an enabler for rapid deployment of new customer experiences. Integration between cloud systems using standard interfaces is now simpler than ever. The target for a full cloud ecosystem using best-of-breed services to build your customer experience is within easy reach. AI, chatbots, speech recognition – all these services can be added to your solution to enrich the customer journey or deliver process optimization.
But great CX is about more than “just” technology
Many companies have invested in the latest contact center technologies or new data analytics tools but have not invested in leveraging their full capabilities. Integration delivers value. It helps address the fact that the customer journey is better when systems work together to deliver the experience.
The Orange philosophy is to start with your objective of world-class CX and work backwards to understand how technology can deliver it. Our integration teams begin by working to understand your business environment, operations, customers and industry competitors. We also look at what your customers expect from you. Then with this done, we develop a roadmap and formulate a plan that can create next-generation CX.
Companies will always have legacy technologies and processes in place, which create points of entry, and some are more useful than others. We evaluate these solutions in light of today’s CX and recommend whether and how customers should still use them.
And that’s another thing Orange does. We don’t come in and just tell companies to change technologies for its own sake. We advise on whether and how business processes and ways of working need to evolve, too. We are committed to ensuring we don’t limit integration to just technology: it’s always about the business perspective and the quantifiable benefits you can get.
The right partner can help you integrate seamlessly
According to our strategic partner, Genesys, just 19% of companies have a customer experience team that helps them integrate tools, processes and systems effectively and bridge the gaps in their business. You can’t deliver a seamless CX to your customers if your own systems and solutions don’t operate seamlessly; this is why working with the right integration partner is crucial.
Orange can help you connect your sales, marketing and customer support operations in one seamless whole, powered by the latest digital technologies. That’s your path to getting a 360-degree view of your customers, understanding what they expect, making better decisions and driving your business forward.
We believe there are four key success factors in CX integration, as follows:
1. Integrators need to have skills across all enterprise IT and CX components from networking, security to voice, along with contact center, robotic process automation and AI. Because only then can they have an end-to-end holistic view and identify the best fit for integration. It is also key to be able to execute these skills for all regional and stakeholder needs in order to meet expectations in all locations.
2. It is crucial to understand the enterprise IT ecosystem and business processes. This is because the tools can be used in different ways depending on the business activity. It will guide how the new tool or technology should be integrated to ensure the enterprise gets the maximum benefit from it.
3. Identify product limitations or compatibility issues from the outset. This information may impact the tools or the features that will be used and the overall solution design.
4. Manageability and simplicity are key considerations when new components are added to an IT ecosystem. The CX ecosystem can already be complicated with many available tools and channels. Integration should aim to reduce the visible complexity and ensure maximum operability. This will enable operations to become more efficient and cost effective.
Özgür Cay has been Head of Customer Experience Consulting since January 2020. He has more than 20 years of experience in IT and telecommunications and has held roles in management, managed services and product development. He has an MBA and Bachelor degree in Computer Engineering. Özgür lives in Dortmund, Germany with his family and enjoys reading books and traveling in his free time.