Companies now understand customer experience (CX) is the primary differentiator, the main battleground. Their leadership is galvanized behind it. Whether they’re in retail, financial services, communications services or healthcare, organizations are working to improve CX by engaging customers in real time.
For nearly two-thirds of business leaders, the ability to respond to CX issues in real time is a top-three priority. But only 13 percent are certain their organizations can do this with existing processes and systems.
Why Are So Many Organizations Still Struggling To Implement Proactive CX?
Why do many still find it a challenge to derive actionable insights from their troves of data? Or to personalize customer interactions in real time (let alone across channels)? While every organization is different, they’re facing common challenges as they try to raise their game on customer experiences. Here’s what we keep hearing from CX professionals across multiple industries:
“‘Good Enough’ Is No Longer Good Enough”
Customer expectations continue to rise, driven by best-in-class experiences they’re getting from wholly unrelated industries. More often than not, customers are asking “Why can’t you do that, too?” They expect to have continuous conversations anytime, anywhere, and want brands that serve them to anticipate their needs. And as their expectations rise higher, their tolerance for error dips lower, with 1 in 3 consumers willing to ditch a brand after one bad experience.
“We’re Buckling Under Data That’s Difficult To Leverage”
Organizations have the data to predict customers’ needs and personalize their treatment, but it’s fragmented across business silos and requires stitching together. And if they can extract the data, it’s rarely clean and requires reconciliation. Even when clean, it’s difficult to mine actionable insight from it. What they’re left with is frustration: from a wealth of data, the best organizations can do is cobble together multiple profiles of the same customer that are riddled with gaps.
“We’ve Made Investments We Can’t Afford to Rip and Replace”
CX leaders have already invested so much into their core backend and communications systems that their budgets can’t sustain another multi-year rip-and-replace project to enable the personalized, cross-channel experiences that customers expect. What’s more, brands can’t sustain additional disruption to their touchpoints that continually serve customers every day.
Where Do Organizations Go from Here?
PATH 1: Keep Grinding Along with Disjointed Systems and Point Solutions
Many organizations have a digital engagement stack that doesn’t integrate well and data silos that leave gaping holes in the customer profiles they use. They can keep trying to personalize customer interactions based on those incomplete profiles, but they’ll keep having misfires: the wrong offers, sent over suboptimal channels, hitting customers either too early or too late. If they want to get any better, it will remain labor-intensive and expensive to tack on more point solutions and glue them together just to achieve underwhelming results.
PATH 2: Get Absorbed into a DXP Giant’s Suite
Digital experience platform (DXP) providers have name recognition and tell a good story, so partnering with them may seem like a lower-risk move to drive better customer experiences. But what most organizations will end up with is a world of compromise and missed expectations. Oftentimes, businesses will only benefit from a sliver of the real-time engagement capabilities of these platforms—that is, until they make the massive investments to adopt and fully integrate new backend systems from the same vendor. Businesses won’t extract material value from the DXP unless they’re using it alongside the vendor’s other core system components.
PATH 3: Use a Single, Flexible Solution and Scale with Each Success
You can simplify. You can introduce a comprehensive end-to-end solution that sits alongside your current tech stack and, with robust integrations, makes the existing components work even better. It reconciles with the investments you’ve already made but gives you the flexibility to improve. You get fast time to value by personalizing experiences in real time on an initial customer journey, then scaling from there to additional journeys, channels and lines of business.
We Believe Path 3 is the Only Promising One Toward Better Experiences.
That’s Why We Created CSG Xponent.
CSG Xponent is a cloud-based platform that helps organizations automate personalized experiences at every stage of the customer journey, based on customers’ real-time interactions. The platform consolidates customer data from across your organization, extracts insights from it, and then executes actions in real time through an intelligent decisioning engine. All that, in a flexible platform that meets your tech stack where it is now.
What does that allow you to do? Engage the customer from acquisition to retention, and respond to their needs in the right moment through whatever channels they’re using.
For example, Xponent enables you to always be retaining customers. Instead of waiting until the customer is about to leave your brand before you offer them a costly retention package, you can be offering them more targeted upsells and cross-sells throughout their journey, with surgical precision based on their behaviors. That’s one example of the always-on customer engagement the right CX solution can provide.
How Xponent Works
- Xponent untangles your customer data to create neat, comprehensive customer profiles you can leverage with confidence.
- Those profiles then feed into a journey orchestration interface that pulls analytics on customer behavior, and it uses the insights to decide what content and treatments to send to which customers when, and over which channels.
- That intelligent decisioning interface then connects to all of the organization’s digital communication channels, delivering personalized interactions in real time, everywhere your customers engage with your brand.
Plus, CSG provides fast-start packages of preconfigured journeys to help organizations hit the ground running. CSG also provides the expertise to help optimize those journeys and scale the solution to other use cases, processes and areas of the business.
Xponent is our response to the pressures CX professionals and their brands are facing today, because with it they can:
- Increase revenue by coordinating real-time interactions and reminders to use your product or service
- Reduce costs by managing journey strategy, customer data management and omnichannel engagement from a central platform
- Improve efficiency by automating engagement on the channels customers use every day (SMS, voice, email and more)
- Speed up time to market and lower risk by using a federated SaaS solution delivered through managed services (no rip-and-replace required)
Xponent is the practical way to take the lead in CX—not falling behind, nor merely disappearing into the crowd. By harnessing the power of your data, you give customers the kind of individualized experience that only they would get, and only your brand could deliver. To learn more details about Xponent and how it works, click here.