A fresh wave of enterprise-grade tools are helping businesses keep customers happy. Scott Yelton, senior director of product development for Windstream Enterprise, takes a closer look.
Not long ago, analysts at PwC provided their simple formula for businesses to grow revenue and build loyalty with customers: “Experience is everything. Get it right.”
While they may understand that formula, plenty of companies across a broad range of industries don’t appear to be following it. Indeed, the perceived quality of CX, as rated by U.S. consumers, plummeted in 2024 for an unprecedented third consecutive year, according to Forrester, to its lowest point since the firm launched its CX index in 2007.
Customers crave memorable, seamless experiences, yet many are left wanting more. This gap presents a powerful opportunity for companies to stand out. By delivering the kind of customer journey that people expect but seldom receive, you can not only win customer loyalty but also drive significant growth. Research from Forrester shows that even a one-point improvement in customer experience (CX) can lead to substantial revenue gains. Now is the time to invest in CX and unlock the potential for lasting success
Improving CX is a process. And the logical starting point for that process is to strengthen the infrastructure that supports CX, because the reality is, when the systems, processes and capabilities that comprise that infrastructure are lacking, the quality of the customer journeys an organization provides will tend to be lacking, too. That’s particularly true for organizations that rely on old-school communications hardware and software to connect with customers, many of whom have decidedly modern ideas about what their CX should look and feel like.
If the goal is to make cost-effective, scalable CX improvements, small and mid-sized businesses as well as larger enterprises would be wise to look to the cloud, where the most impactful, ready-to-implement infrastructure improvements tend to reside. Here are two areas where a switch to cloud-based communications infrastructure can have an outsized positive impact on the quality of an organization’s CX:
1. A unified communications platform that combines voice with more robust capabilities in other communications channels. If acronyms like PBX, TDM, and POTS (short for “plain old telephone service”) apply to your organization’s communications infrastructure, your customers could be in for less-than-optimal experiences interacting with your business. Not only do these types of legacy technologies tend to translate into disjointed, unfulfilling customer journeys, they also can be expensive to manage and maintain.
For many companies, that’s justification enough to shift to cloud-based unified communications, and UCaaS (unified communications as a service) specifically. UCaaS combines voice, chat, text, video, audio and web conferencing, desktop sharing, and mobile apps to help companies reshape their CX, with tools to enable their service and support teams to provide consistently smooth, rich customer interactions and timely, positive resolutions via customers’ preferred channels. I see it time and again, where switching to UCaaS enables customer support teams to increase caseloads and improve customer outcomes, whether their team members are working in the office or remotely.
Because it resides in the cloud, not only is UCaaS well suited to support remote and hybrid work set-ups, it also keeps communications channels open during a disruption like a weather-related disaster so businesses can continue to serve customers.
To deliver a superior customer experience, your service and support teams need access to apps, tools and customer information, wherever they happen to be working. UCaaS provides that access within a single environment, so employees won’t have to hop from app to app, system to system, just to resolve a customer issue. Everything they need to serve the customer is right in front of them.
As sophisticated as UCaaS capabilities like these are, they’re accessible to (and generally affordable for) small and midsized businesses (SMBs) as well as larger enterprises. When an SMB can provide customer experiences that equal or surpass those of larger competitors in terms of quality, that’s an important equalizer.
2. An intelligent contact center. No part of your business is as integral to the customer experience as the contact center. As the hub through which your organization and its customers and prospects interact, in many respects, it’s the face and voice of your business and your brand. Here’s another area where relying on disparate, old-school systems and processes not only can burden a company with high and unpredictable capital and operational costs, it also can yield subpar experiences for the customer. One red flag is a low first-call resolution rate, often the result of contact center agents lacking insight into customers, as well as the tools to resolve issues in the moment. Customer satisfaction scores — and by extension, sales and customer loyalty — are bound to suffer as a result.
As with unified communications, whether you’re an SMB or a large enterprise, it’s worth looking to the cloud for a modern contact center as a service (CCaaS) offering that includes intelligent capabilities. With artificial intelligence onboard, CCaaS enables a company to provide highly personalized interactions and support, with natural conversations and interactions that seamlessly jump between text, voice, web, chat and email, without losing context. AI-powered chatbots and assistants eliminate major customer pain points like long wait times and repetitive authentication processes.
Drawing from past clicks, preferences and order history, CCaaS can provide hyper-personalized customer recommendations during a virtual assistant or chatbot interaction. What’s more, an AI-powered copilot embedded within CCaaS can “listen” to customer-agent interactions in real-time, take the temperature of an interaction (by analyzing the customer’s vocal tone), and guide agents toward effective issue resolution.
An intelligent CCaaS system also can empower customers with self-service options so they get what they’re seeking faster. With analytics tools, it can help contact center managers quickly identify quality issues and emerging trends in customer queries, revealing areas to improve CX that otherwise might be overlooked.
As fast as communications technologies are advancing, enterprise-caliber UCaaS and CCaaS capabilities have become accessible and affordable even to small and mid-sized businesses, enabling their CX to stand out for all the right reasons against much larger and more entrenched competitors.
About the Author
Scott Yelton is senior director of product development for Windstream Enterprise, which provides high-performance, cloud-enabled connectivity, communications and security solutions, with a focus on managed collaboration, connectivity and network services for enterprise organizations. For more information visit www.windstreamenterprise.com.
