When contact center solutions and customer relationship management platforms were first introduced to the market, they served distinctly different purposes. Contact centers handled calls and interactions, while CRM systems managed customer records and ticketing/cases/incidents. Over time, CRM and CCaaS solutions have evolved to increasingly encroach into each other's spaces, resulting in overlapping features and functionalities. These overlaps have resulted in multiple user experiences, redundant processes, duplicated capabilities, and increasing costs, challenging modern enterprises to optimize CX.
The operational chaos makes it difficult to meet today's evolving customer needs. 73% of customers expect better personalization and 81% faster service than ever before. Traditional systems can't keep up, thus giving rise to a new CX approach: Customer Experience as a Service (CXaaS).
What is CXaaS?
Customer Experience as a Service (CXaaS) is the unified approach to delivering enhanced customer experiences. By consolidating technologies such as CCaaS and CRM into a single, centralized platform, CXaaS empowers organizations with streamlined workflows and omnichannel engagements. Unlike traditional CRM and CCaaS approaches, which create siloed environments, duplicative features, and operational inefficiencies, CXaaS provides a seamless, end-to-end customer journey. This enables enterprises to deliver faster, more personalized CX while reducing costs and complexity.
Five immediate CXaaS benefits
Adopting a CXaaS approach can bring several transformative benefits for organizations aiming to optimize their entire customer service experience.
1. Streamlined operations
By consolidating front-, mid-, and back-office operations into one unified CX solution, platform swivel-chairing, overlapping features, and duplicative processes are eliminated. Instead, agents and supervisors are empowered with a single source of thought, boosting efficiency and productivity while reducing operational bottlenecks and costs.
2. Faster, more personalized experience than ever
A unified CX approach empowers service teams with an omnichannel platform, working as a single source of truth for customer data, performance metrics, and reports. With all information readily available, AI assistants, human agents, and supervisors have the information they need to proactively optimize processes, boost performance, and deliver faster, more personalized experiences than ever before.
3. Comprehensive reporting and insights
With CRM data and contact center insights consolidated into unified dashboards and reports, supervisors can easily monitor performance, productivity, sentiment, and satisfaction across the end-to-end customer journey in a single environment. This comprehensive view makes it easy to proactively refine operations and optimize service strategies to maximize CX outcomes.
4. Effortless cost reductionA CXaaS approach unifies workflows and processes through a single platform, therefore avoiding duplication of features and processes. With improved resource allocation, in conjunction with more efficient live agents and self-service interaction management, operational costs are effortlessly reduced.
5. Long-term growth opportunities
Need WhatsApp? Or want real-time sentiment analysis? No problem! CXaaS platforms are flexible by design, meaning they are built to scale with evolving business requirements. The unified platform structure makes it easy to complement and enhance existing capabilities without overlap.
The challenge behind building a true CXaaS solution
For a centralized CX platform to be successfully deployed, CRM and CCaaS vendors must work harmoniously. In other words, they must agree on what solution becomes the new core CXaaS platform and who should build and integrate what capabilities and workflows. In many cases, this might be easier said than done. With vendors heavily invested in their own platforms, capabilities, and roadmaps, building a single CXaaS platform would mean at least one of the two partners must give up their workspace. Should the CRM be the source of truth, or should agents and supervisors work out of the CCaaS platform?
As explained by Forrester, “More CRM and CCaaS vendors have come on board to this paradigm, as there are clearly capabilities that CRM do best and the same holds true for CCaaS vendors. CRM systems, for example, excel at managing customer details, resolution workflows, and knowledge, while CCaaS vendors lead at omnichannel routing, quality, and workforce management. There are also capabilities on which the vendors compete; for example, agent workspaces or digital channel interactions - to name just a few.”
Competitive features and processes create challenges for organizations trying to establish streamlined processes and a seamless customer experience. Should performance be tracked through the CCaaS system or the CRM? And how about chat—should that be delivered from the CRM or the CCaaS? Due to a continuous lack of alignment, enterprises are stuck swivel-chairing between platforms to access contact records, ticket/incident/case data, duplicative reports, and competing communication channels.
For example:
- A healthcare organization might use ServiceNow CSM to track patient cases and send emails, while its CCaaS solution is leveraged to handle calls and track agent performance.
- A retail company might use ServiceNow ITSM to track IT issues but rely on its CCaaS platform to handle incoming calls from store locations.
- A local state agency might keep track of its SNAP benefit users through ServiceNow PSDS but handle constituent calls through a separate CCaaS platform.
The devil is in the details: How to complement existing offerings
When selecting CCaaS and CRM solutions for your CXaaS environment, it's essential to evaluate whether at least one vendor seamlessly integrates its capabilities within the other platform or if both prefer to keep some features separate. One optimal example is 3CLogic and ServiceNow. 3CLogic offers AI-powered contact center capabilities purpose-built to integrate with ServiceNow to complement and enhance existing features and processes. For example:
- Single omnichannel Agent Workspace: By complementing ServiceNow's existing digital channels with voice and SMS, 3CLogic delivers a single omnichannel agent workspace to eliminate agent swivel-chairing and manual tasks while enabling faster customer service.
- AI that powers AI: 3CLogic provides real-time call transcription and GenAI call summarization, complementing existing ServiceNow capabilities such as Now Assist and GenAI for case Resolution Notes. This combination allows 3CLogic's specific AI-powered capabilities to enable broader ServiceNow AI workflows and processes, driving the greatest level of automation and efficiency without feature overlap.
- Streamlined reporting: 3CLogic enriches ServiceNow with contact center KPIs, AI-powered sentiment results, and real-time metrics to complement its native BI reporting tool, Performance Analytics, or WFO solution. This unified approach makes it easy to evaluate performance, generate comprehensive reports, or enable forecasting in combination with ServiceNow data without the arduous and manual task of exporting and merging data sets in Excel.
Conclusion
The future of CX is already here, and it's called Customer Experience as a Service (CXaaS). This new approach to CX consolidates technologies into a single centralized solution, making it easy for organizations to streamline workflows and engagements to optimize CX outcomes and reduce operational costs.
If you're curious to learn more about this topic, please schedule a demo with one of our experts. They'll guide you through how to create a personalized CXaaS strategy for your organization.
