What Defines a Comprehensive CX Platform? A CX Buyer’s Guide
What are the most important features that make a CX solution comprehensive? Innovation, core capabilities, openness, exceptional customer enablement, and reach.
A CX buyer’s guide
The marketplace for VoC, surveys, acquisition support, loyalty, contact center and other customer experience aligned solutions continues to grow both in complexity and scope. This is largely because the evolving ever-more digital customer experience itself is changing all the time. To address this trend, many companies, including Verint, have turned to a platform approach, combining multiple offers and solutions into a more comprehensive solution.
But not all CX platforms are built the same. Below we’ll dive into how platforms are made and then explore what separates a good CX platform from an outstanding CX platform.
Innovating customer experience software
According to Frost and Sullivan’s Frost Radar ™: Voice of Customer Analytics, 2022, 5 key factors indicate a CX solution’s innovativeness. These are:
- Innovation Scalability
- Research and Development
- Product Portfolio
- Mega Trends Leverage, and
- Customer Alignment
For CX solutions to be innovative, they need to do well in each of these categories. There are a few main approaches an organization can take to innovating on their offering. They can build their own new product by investing in R&D, buy existing top performers, or white label other company’s software.
For example, Verint has been highly successful with our build and buy approach, allowing us to integrate the powerful capabilities offered by ForeSee, Conversocial, and Qudini with our existing impressive software portfolio. Thanks to a powerful R&D department and native integration with Da Vinci AI, all of these now work seamlessly together in Verint Voice of the Customer.
Get A DemoCore capabilities of a comprehensive CX Solution
What do you need your CX solution to do? For a CX Buyer, answering this question is critical.
Organizations often approach CX vendors because they need to better understand the voice of the customer. While this has traditionally been entirely survey based, whether on receipts at retail establishments or as follow-up surveys across many industries, voice of the customer goes far beyond simple surveys.
Choose a CX vendor that allows you to present surveys anywhere, ad-hoc or planned, and that enables the quick infusion of this data across the business.
Another key need for CX practitioners and leaders is unified data and analytics across the customer journey and organization. Without being able to connect data and insights from different teams and manage that data on an individual customer level, it’s far more difficult to take that data and turn insights into action.
Choose a cx vendor that can unify your customer insights across experiences and break down internal silos between your workforce and customer across departments.
CX automation is another area where CX leaders often seek help from vendors. These capabilities can be as simple as automated triggers, or as complex as AI integration and dynamically chosen journey paths for your customers. When you automate the boring processes, especially the ones where AI can easily enhance your human team, the benefits abound.
Choose a cx vendor that not only can connect to external automation and AI solutions, but has built in decisioning, triggers, automation, and AI capabilities as well.
A comprehensive solution must be open
When you’re looking for a vendor that offers a comprehensive CX solution, they must be able to deliver open CCaaS and open CX solutions alongside their own capabilities and portfolio.
No matter what any vendor tells you, even the most powerful and innovative CX solutions and platforms cannot always do everything alone. You need a solution that can plug into other resources like a CRM or various data sources, not only their own tools. That’s not to say a CX Platform shouldn’t have many capabilities, but openness is a force multiplier when it comes to CX in both practice and vender choice.
Get A DemoBetter enablement makes for better CX Software
When your organization is tasked with a CX project, how often do you find that expensive support and consulting services are absolutely required for setup? Before you even start to see improvements, you might be spending anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of dollars on services alone.
Ridiculous as it might sound, some platforms become so complicated for day-to-day use that a team can only use the simplest capabilities with recurring project costs. For more complex projects, it may make sense to pay for some services, especially when time is of the essence, but one mark of a truly comprehensive CX platform is the ability for its users to truly be, well, users.
Choose CX solutions with complete documentation and the ability for you to manage your own level of support. Highly capable services and consulting likely will have a place in your CX program from time to time but it shouldn’t be required for even minor changes.
The best solutions not only make it easy for users to understand mechanically how a process works, but also provide guidelines on how to use the platform’s capabilities beyond simple changes.
A CX Solution to help you reach for the stars
In the context of CX solutions it’s essential that you can address both the big picture of your entire customer lifecycle and unify your CX data, but just as important is being able to dive in to the individual, so that you can close the loop on customer issues.
A comprehensive solution allows you to both see the big picture and granular details, all in one place. But reach isn’t only the ability to widen or narrow a view, it also means reaching across silos to unify data, drive action, and enhance analytics across the organization. In the modern CX landscape, it’s not enough to improve web experiences if the mobile experience suffers, or to only improve experience in branch or store and neglect online self-service capabilities.
Choose a CX solution that lets you build a truly comprehensive customer experience. Because the ultimate mark of a comprehensive solution, is the experience you can deliver.
What makes an end-to-end platform different
The fact remains, customer experience improvement has moved beyond being a nice-to-have to a true differentiator across industry, government and everything in between. To remain relevant, have up-to date data, and deliver great experiences, you need an end-to-end CX platform.
The value of a comprehensive solution goes beyond simple CX improvements like NPS and CSAT scores, though those will benefit as well. Truly impactful CX changes are possible when you connect your workforce, contact center, CX processes and channels, all powered by CX automation and AI.
Verint Voice of Customer is a truly comprehensive CX solution, powered by best-in-breed data, workforce, and experience management, combined with award-winning channel automation and self-service. With Verint Voice of Customer, you can unify your data from every source, act faster to close the loop and adjust the customer journey, and analyze deeper, even leveraging predictive modeling to drive future success.
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