Customer experience as a service (CXaaS) is a fully managed approach to customer engagement that combines service talent, customer experience (CX) expertise, and CX technology. This managed services approach empowers organizations to deliver the CX you want with the speed, reliability, and efficiency your customers demand—without breaking the bank. CXaaS eliminates the need to manage multiple vendors and helps organizations deliver the kind of experiences that today’s customers expect—easy, effective, and satisfying—in a quick, efficient, and inexpensive way.
Core components of CXaaS:
CXaaS can help companies improve CSAT and NPS, unify your strategy across departments, deliver differentiated experiences, and accelerate CX transformation. In addition, this approach can reduce operational costs by 20% or more, help you make the most of your existing technology investments, improve agent productivity, and decrease risk around things like regulatory compliance. And it can help your business overcome both internal and external roadblocks to service automation, ensuring access to the latest technologies, innovations, and advances.
As business needs evolve, CXaaS can continually optimize for both self-service and agent-assisted experiences, finding new ways to increase automation and containment.
Most companies are still using siloed solutions to deliver CX. Much of the problem comes down to how companies organize. Self-service channels, such as chatbots and IVR, as well as assisted services like contact centers, are often managed separately, with little connection between the two.
Within technology solutions there’s also a division between digital (text, chat, messaging) and non-digital (voice-based) channels. Further dividing the digital side, you have conversational AI (digital), self-service tools, FAQ management, and your knowledge base. On the voice side, you have IVR and AI-based conversational IVR. However, there’s rarely anything uniform about these solutions or the way their performance and outcomes are measured.
Organizational division also matters when it comes to implementing new strategic initiatives, including in the realm of CX. For example, when one part of a company issues an RFP, oftentimes leaders from other divisions are neither involved nor aware. When departments don’t keep each other in the loop, it’s very difficult to determine what’s truly important to the business as a whole. Each department or division operates on a different set of policies and procedures, often juggling multiple vendors with different SLAs. This results in additional operational expenses and disjointed experiences for customers.
While customer satisfaction and NPS are important metrics, companies should also be measuring the total cost-per-resolved-conversation (CPRC). Only by looking at the total expense across channels can you understand what it really costs to serve a customer.
In a 2021 Everest Group report, analysts cited the following key challenges enterprises face with current CX approaches:
Customer experience is all about how customers discover, engage, interact with, and feel about the companies they buy products and services from. CX is the sum total of all their interactions, both good and bad—and it’s ever-changing and evolving.
Although voice remains the dominant channel for customer support, other touchpoints including chat, email, web, and even SMS continue to grow. The overall customer experience is shaped by all of these channels.
Behavioral analytics tell us that a customer’s opinion and perception of a brand is usually based on their most recent interaction with that company. In addition, our own research indicates that just one bad experience can cause customers to switch to a competitor.
So, we know that delivering the best CX is a competitive advantage. But measuring it accurately is a challenge. With so many levers—quality, price, situation, motivation, and emotion—in the mix and happening in real time across so many channels, getting to “the truth” can be daunting.
We also know this is a team sport. With massive amounts of data being collected in contact centers, for example, it’s impossible to analyze and correlate multiple streams without a solution that unifies and harmonizes everything.
An effective CXaaS platform needs to:
Delivering transformative and results-based insights is now possible, thanks to advances in everything from voice to chat to cloud. However, cloud alone is merely the infrastructure to serve up critical information to multiple stakeholders in contact centers and the companies they serve. The cloud makes advanced applications possible, particularly when those applications leverage the advantages of cloud storage and processing.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced companies to rethink the way they monitor, measure, and optimize digital conversations with individual customers. That can mean web-based requests a chatbot responds to in a self-service model, direct voice calls into a contact center, or a mix of the two. With advanced software platforms hosted on the cloud, it’s possible to capture content, sentiment, and outcomes from each and every interaction.
Our CX Reality Check 2021: Momentum Interrupted report, which looked at the pandemic’s impact on digital transformation, made it clear that delivering great CX is more vital than ever—but it’s also become more difficult than ever. As we consider the challenges that the new, post-pandemic CX reality presents, CXaaS has emerged as a very attractive option for businesses to overcome both internal and external roadblocks to digital transformation.
At [24]7.ai, we believe the only way companies can benefit from the true measurement of CX is “as a service”—and we believe that CXaaS is the wave of the future.
Here are just a few of the key ways CXaaS can help you improve customer experience across channels and time.
CXaaS done well must involve working with the platforms and technologies that you’ve already invested in—for example, IVR, ERP, or CRM systems. And it must be able to fuse what the company wants to happen with what customers want to happen, allowing you to decide what actions to take (or not take) to improve experiences.
With the volume of data and analytics this entails, the only way to make CXaaS happen for a reasonable price is by leveraging the cloud—for storage and analytics, ingesting data from multiple sources, consolidating it into an AI application, and delivering it to end-users using an intuitive interface with information that’s easy to understand and act on.
CXaaS brings together the factual “as-is” with the predictive “what-might-be”—a synthesis that’s only possible when ingesting massive data streams and extracting insights that help the business evolve along with your customers. When done right, the ROI is significant. Look at what a one-point improvement in this CX Index from Forrester delivers in terms of cost savings:
Table 1. One-Point Improvement in CX Index Score Results
| Annual incremental revenue per customer (from a one-point increase) |
X |
Average number of customers per company | = |
Total revenue | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Auto manufacturers (mass market) | $48.50 | X | 18 million | = | $873 million |
| Hotels (upscale) | $7.54 | X | 44 million | = | $332 million |
| Wireless service providers | $3.39 | X | 82 million | = | $278 million |
| Big-box retailers | $2.44 | X | 100 million | = | $244 million |
| Auto and home insurance providers | $14.32 | X | 15 million | = | $215 million |
| Airlines | $3.49 | X | 48 million | = | $168 million |
| Traditional retail banks | $8.27 | X | 15 million | = | $124 million |
| TV service providers | $6.11 | X | 17 million | = | $104 million |
| Internet service providers | $5.26 | X | 16 million | = | $84 million |
| Rental car providers | $1.67 | X | 40 million | = | $67 million |
| Auto manufacturers (luxury) | $104.16 | X | 350,000 million | = | $36 million |
| Direct banks | $9.96 | X | 3 million | = | $30 million |
| Credit card providers | $0.15 | X | 61 million | = | $9 million |
Given the proven ROIs for such mainstream use cases, what’s holding companies back from committing to increasingly sophisticated CX programs?
Technology is not the only answer. However, the right solutions are now possible given the evolution of software, cloud, and networks. So where should you start when it comes to transforming legacy contact centers and apps to tap into more and more data as your sales and services become increasingly digital?
While each individual customer has different priorities, delivering a great experience comes down to understanding their real needs as well as company expectations, and providing the means to deliver on both. But when there are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of interactions taking place every day—how is it possible to deliver this kind of intelligent, responsive, and extremely personalized service?
The answer: CXaaS makes it possible. CXaaS integrates applications that listen for keywords and capture sentiment, from confused to upset to enraged. At the same time, it works seamlessly with internal applications—to access, for example, previous orders, previous interactions, high value customer data, loyalty programs—to instantly support effective resolution, sales, or technical support.
Effective CXaaS can be implemented cost-effectively as an opex-only service, served from the cloud where information is securely stored, with analytics run in near-real or real time, on a subscription or per-seat basis. It’s important to have highly sensitive and yet infinitely scalable machine learning and AI services designed to collect, analyze, and deliver insights on what makes conversations and experiences great, whether they’re delivered by a bot or a live expert. This capability enables exponentially more intelligent interactions—one interaction at a time, and all the time.
CXaaS empowers organizations to deliver CX with the speed, reliability, and efficiency their customers expect—without breaking the bank. Cloud economics is a powerful element of CXaaS, given that the software can be implemented quickly and scaled as the organization expands, contracts, or otherwise changes.
The other great advantage of CXaaS is the ability to combine forces and integrate applications using APIs—programming CX platforms based on specific offerings, products, services, and business models.
For example, CXaaS for a retailer is very different than for a broadband provider. With programmable capabilities, we can adapt endlessly, supporting marketing campaigns or responding to business challenges such as product recalls, changes to programming, outages, and more. CXaaS is “real time, all the time”—endlessly scalable and adaptive.
CXaaS is designed to deliver great experiences with great applications—alongside agents that can interact with people, your customers, who appreciate being seen, heard, and treated with personalized care.
As brands, companies, and organizations strive to deliver millions of positive “moments of truth” in unprecedented volumes, the right data analytics empowers unprecedented positive outcomes.
A major U.S. retailer recently achieved extraordinary results in their first 90 days with [24]7.ai Managed Customer Engagement, our CXaaS offering. The service was deployed in less than 30 days resulting in a 48% increase in service automation across multiple channels, 28% reduction in cost per contact, and peak CSAT performance at 4.6/5.0.
In another example, a satellite television company saw a 57% containment rate within the first 90 days. As this rate increased, the company was able to gradually reduce the headcount needed to staff its CX program. At the same time, agents became more efficient and their performance improved. Efficiency jumped by more than 150% and CSAT from agent interactions improved by more than 100% thanks to agents having the right technology at their fingertips.
In our recent webinar, Managed Customer Engagement – A Disruptive Way Forward for CX, analysts from Opus Research discussed what they saw as the market opportunity. They also provided many useful recommendations for companies considering CXaaS as a way to transform their business and meet the exploding digital demand.
Delivering better CX experiences through "managed customer engagement," the term Opus uses for CXaaS, helps to reduce costs, increase automation, and expand digital channel adoption. The webinar focuses on specific techniques to succeed with digital transformation initiatives. Topics include overcoming cross-departmental hurdles to connect technology silos, unique integrations of artificial intelligence and human intelligence (AI + HI), how to link teams, obtain executive sponsorship and change mindsets, and what it takes to find the right partner.
In the webinar, Dan Miller, principal analyst for Opus Research, said, “There is a lot of pressure for companies to ride this wave of digital transformation. It is customer driven, it’s pandemic driven, but it creates first order problems to rising to the challenge of a spike in outreach to the contact center, across multiple channels. There is the expectation that the best way to fulfill the requirements involves a move to the cloud.”
In response to Miller’s list of what can go wrong with digital transformation, Cory Good, SVP of Digital Transformation for [24]7.ai, said, “A couple of things jump out to me. One is this idea that ‘we’re already doing it.’ It reminds me of someone with a first generation smartphone. You can say you have a smartphone, but that smartphone is very different from the one you have today. The 1.0 version can be pretty lousy, so for companies to think they already have this is part of the problem. Technologies change very quickly, and if you’re not in a robust enterprise solution, it’s not going to be what you think it is.”
The bottom line is this: CXaaS is the fastest way for companies to drive CX transformation and realize valuable business benefits. Combining technology and service models to support CX best practices has proven to drive more than 20% cost reduction while improving CSAT. Done right, CXaaS can drive sales growth, enable self-service through automation, and improve CX through better agent experiences.
To find out how [24]7.ai Managed Customer Engagement can help your organization reach your CX goals and keep up with rising digital demand, contact us today.
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