Over the past two decades, the contact center industry has promised capabilities that will significantly improve customer experience. This is important because CX is now the top brand differentiator, with many consumers switching loyalties because of a single bad experience. Though it’s true that the contact center providers have delivered new capabilities such as omnichannel communications, self-service tools and more, consumer satisfaction with contact centers remains low.
Customer experience improvement remains a top initiative for business and information technology leaders. The stakes are high in CX. My research has found that 95% of companies now compete on CX and, last year, two-thirds of millennials admitted to switching brands because of a single bad experience. Contact centers and the customer experience professionals who staff them are the unsung heroes of many businesses.
Customer Contact Week, being held in Las Vegas this week, has evolved from focusing on hard-core contact centers to a broader customer experience event. This aligns with the contact-center-as-a-service or CCaaS providers’ direction, where their products have expanded beyond the traditional agent to other customer-facing roles.
Contact center market leader NICE Ltd. used the recent Enterprise Connect show to add to its artificial intelligence portfolio with the release of Enlighten XM (Experience Memory), which adds AI-infused contextual memory to the contact center.
For the better part of the last decade, customer experience has ranked near or at the top of every information technology and business leader’s priority list. That’s because 90% of companies compete on CX, significantly up from 26% five years ago. Another interesting supporting data point from my research is that, in 2023, 71% of millennials admitted changing loyalties to a brand from a single bad experience.