Contact centers’ cloud migration continues apace, but for the larger CX picture, it seems likely that enterprises will be wrestling with heterogeneous environments requiring considerable integration among call handling, data, AI, and mobility elements. Companies must bring all of these to bear if they want to provide the level of CX that customers increasingly demand.
A recent Twilio survey, flagged by CX Dive, highlights the extent of the need. “The vast majority of businesses — 96% — plan to build custom CX solutions instead of buying them off-the-shelf, leveraging application programming interfaces to integrate new tools [and] technologies,” CX Dive reports.
“However, while best-of-breed solutions offer businesses the opportunity to tailor their tech stack to meet their specific needs, they can pose greater integration and onboarding challenges than less specialized all-in-one suites, which are designed to work together harmoniously,” the article notes.
In other words, it’s the eternal tradeoff, which may be leaning toward best-of-breed. Here at the dawn of the AI era, few use cases beyond call transcription seem to be ubiquitously catching on. And one of the main obstacles to broad-based adoption is the state of enterprise data integration, about which CX Dive writes, “Almost half of businesses — 44% — report struggling to connect customer data across channels, sources and platforms. Nearly one-third claim inadequate technology is a ‘major roadblock’ to learning more about their customers, according to Twilio.”
The more extensive (and therefore useful) the data integration, the more daunting the task. But business leaders won’t wait for such a comprehensive effort before demanding continual improvements in efficiency and cost management, which in turn could drive a more piecemeal approach to AI feature and function deployment. The tradeoff for this approach is in risks of tech debt and vendor dependency.
Another interesting finding from the Twilio survey relates to CX in mobility applications. In what seems to be good news, three-quarters of survey respondents said they plan to invest in RCS (rich communications services), to deliver higher-quality interactions with mobile users. This may also prove a boon in an environment where the prevalence of spam means that trust issues continue to hamper brands’ efforts to communicate with customers via mobile messaging. As this article from CX Dive notes, RCS adds some verification and security elements that could improve the experience.
We come out with a picture of contact center/CX implementation where decisions will be complex, technology stacks will likely remain in flux, and demands of the business will be difficult to translate into real world improvements. AI was never going to be a plug-and-play salvation for the contact center, but it’s increasingly clear just how much more effort will go into building the next generation infrastructure to meet CX demands.
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