For IT leaders, it’s tempting to simply add another point solution to your existing CX tech stack for another feature or functionality. Want to add the latest digital channel to your contact center? Bolt on a point solution. Need analytics on that digital channel? Add another point solution. And on it goes.
But the costs of adding one point solution after another can be high—customer data can be insecure, employees can’t access the data they need for fluid customer service, and customer experiences can be disjointed, leading to long handle times and low rates of resolution. The underlying problem may be that you have a too complex tech stack.
How did we get here?
The route to an overly complex tech stack is as easy as it is sensible. IT leaders are part of buying committees tasked with adding functionality to a company’s IT stack, and they need to do it within a defined budget of time and money. When a new feature is desired, a requesting department may even have a particular solution in mind that can be purchased. Or, it may be the IT department’s preference to develop the program with their own staff.
IT leaders evaluate how to best meet that need within these constraints, although, pressure has been mounting even higher. Sixty-one percent of IT decision makers in a recent Foundry survey admit that the purchase process for new technology is too complex, elongating the process even more. On top of this new pressure, IT professionals were already accustomed to finding ways to patch in new applications to the existing tech stack to make everything work. If a proposed point solution meets the requirements, then it’s a rational decision to purchase and work it in.
If this process is repeated over and over, for each new feature desired in a CX division, then after a while the CX tech stack turns into a “frankenstack”—point solutions cobbled together that require extensive custom work and manpower to keep running smoothly. Despite this, the tech stack often breaks, leaving IT staff scrambling to fix it to support their end users. Customer data is not shared well among all the solutions, so that the customer journey becomes disjointed, especially when the experience is across multiple channels or asynchronous. CX analytics suffers because it can’t bring together all the data on customers collected from multiple touchpoints.
And the employee experience lags behind for both customer service agents and IT staff. Agents don’t have all the information at their fingertips in order to sufficiently assist customers. IT staff spends more time troubleshooting each point solution than in strategizing and developing IT resources for the business.
How do we know if this is us?
There are questions to ask yourself that help determine if you have a too complex tech stack.
First, examine your customer experiences. Do customers need to repeat themselves on single contacts, and do they repeat themselves on successive contacts with information that is already stored by the company? If this is the case, you may have customer data scattered across multiple platforms that isn’t being shared to the right platform or agent at the right time.
Is customer data secure? Do you employ advanced security measures to protect data and infrastructure from risk by using industry-standard best practices—across all CX solutions? If your on-premise hardware is not manually maintained and updated on a strict schedule, you may be compromising customer data. Top-tier modern cloud platforms offer data security and compliance as part of their services, which can offload the worry from IT and build customer trust.
Do customers have to wait longer for service during peak times? If so, you may not have the scalability you need for your CX tech stack. Point solutions pieced together have a hard time working together as it is, and it can be even more difficult if you need to suddenly add human agents or expand digital channel capacity.
Then there are the day-to-day tasks of your IT staff, which may suggest a too complex tech stack. First, are you able to keep up with the operations schedules of the entire tech stack—contract renewals, pricing schedules, software and hardware updates, etc.? If you often seem behind on these critical deadlines, you may have too many point solutions to handle.
Are you paying IT staff solely to support your tech stack? If staff are spending all their time troubleshooting existing solutions, whether developed in-house or purchased, that may indicate you have too many different IT applications to manage.
How would fewer vendors allow you to focus on other KPIs and boost productivity? IT staff could devote more time to strategizing to support CX, rather than simply putting out fires all day. This leads to higher IT job satisfaction and better employee and customer experiences because IT becomes a partner on the CX team instead of a support system fixing bugs.
We answered yes. Now what do we do?
If your tech stack could use some pruning in order to operate more efficiently, there are principles to guide those decisions.
- Take an inventory of everything you’ve got to find redundancies. Are there functionalities that you use that could be fulfilled by more than one of your point solutions? Perhaps one of those solutions could be eliminated or reduced. Forrester summarized this audit in its 2024 Planning Guide: “Even if your budget grows next year, now’s not the time to pay for tools you don’t need today. Conduct a tech audit across CX—including customer service/contact center, digital and experience research, regardless of where they sit in the org—to understand where capabilities overlap. Then, plan for which programs to consolidate and which to sunset entirely.”
- What can you replace that you had to build with something that you can now just buy? If your IT staff developed a program that’s running on your on-premise hardware, you may be able to replace it with a more agile cloud version that is maintained by the vendor.
- What are your organizational goals and how can improved technology bring you closer to reaching them? This leads to a discussion of not just replacing legacy technology with similar cloud technology, but with replacing that technology with something that’s better.
Consider CXone
With all the problems and disadvantages of multiple point solutions laid bare, for customers and employees, it’s time to consider what a unified cloud CX platform can do for you. Integrated, connected applications within one platform means that they communicate with each other, collecting and sharing customer data at the right time. By utilizing AI among all these connected channels, businesses can anticipate and address customer needs and offer proactive outreach. The personalized touch adds to the seamless, connected customer journeys that resolve their inquiries quickly, definitively, and even delightfully.
Plus, a cloud platform means it is secure and scalable. Cloud security has come a long way, and CXone is an ironclad fortress that maintains the highest data security standards, like FedRAMP. Customer-facing operations can scale up or down according to demand. Whether you run a predictable seasonal business or face unexpected surges in customer demand, you can quickly employ additional resources in CXone to meet upticks in customer contacts without making customers wait longer. Uniting AI with a cloud platform in CXone supercharges every application and process, but more than that, it redefines them, creating smarter, more efficient systems that enhance customer experiences. And it can be done with minimal IT effort.
The benefits of the CXone unified data layer
The general benefits of a unified cloud platform are clear for customer and employee experiences. Drilling down more, a primary benefit of CXone that any IT leader will recognize is the unified data layer. Having one set of data accessible to any application or person who needs it lays the groundwork for seamless AI-driven customer experiences across all channels. This foundation handles the complexity of digital channel switching, synchronous and asynchronous interactions, and continuous real-time context for each customer touchpoint.
CXone’s unified data layer orchestrates seamless customer journeys from wherever they start or lead. It uses purpose-built AI models to seamlessly connect digital, self-service, and agent-assisted interactions, enabling companies to guide customers to quick resolutions through personalized journeys.
CXone eliminates silos and promotes streamlined work. The platform centralizes customer interaction data from various sources, such as CRM systems, contact centers, and marketing platforms, enabling AI to streamline employee access to customer information during an interaction. Agents can work from a single, consolidated interface and switch channels quickly and easily with a customer. New digital channels can be easily added to the agent support systems. Gathering and maintaining customer data in one place optimizes AI-driven, proactive outreach to build loyalty and increase sales.
Integrated applications enable agents to access different applications and functionalities without switching between multiple applications. AI-directed, inter-app workflows are triggered by events or actions performed, assisting the agent to get the information they need and directing them to next best steps. Inter-app workflows can include AI-automation capabilities to alleviate redundant or repetitive tasks for agents and minimize errors or delays.
Analytics and reporting utilize CXone’s unified data layer to bring together organizational insights across all departments and communicate them to the stakeholders who can take action to optimize business outcomes. The data collected and stored in one place also gives businesses the ability to build robust AI analytics programs to monitor and measure CX performance. The data insights can be used to identify areas for improvement in the workforce and customer experiences and for continuous real-time monitoring of performance across departments.
What next?
The transformative power of a comprehensive CX platform extends beyond improving customer satisfaction—it directly impacts the organization’s bottom line and empowers IT departments to excel in their roles. By embracing a complete CX management platform, IT leaders can drive significant organizational benefits. A single cloud-native platform drives unification of data that eliminates a host of problems created by point solutions that don’t work well together. Dive into the Lose the Baggage! Accelerate CX Innovation in the Cloud white paper to learn more about all the benefits of a complete cloud solution for your CX operations.