What is CXi?

CXi, which stands for customer experience interactions, is a holistic approach to managing all customer interactions from any starting point across the entire customer journey, regardless of whether those interactions involve the contact center.

A CXi approach can help eliminate the shortcomings of traditional CX management, which involves dispersing responsibilities across different departments and risking suboptimal, disjointed experiences. CXi addresses the need to provide consistent experiences wherever customers begin their journeys and in every path they might follow.

What is the contact center's role in a CXi strategy?

Because so many interactions with a business involve customer service, the contact center plays a critical role in the successful execution of a CXi strategy. Primary methods for contact centers to enhance CX include the following:

• Optimized digital entry points: Focusing on digital entry points allows businesses to help customers as soon as the need arises. These entry points can include when a customer stalls during an online checkout process or accesses an FAQ page. And because most resolution journeys begin with a Google search, businesses need to have a strategy for "meeting customers at Google" and other search engines.

• Journey orchestration: Contact centers need to orchestrate resolution journeys, which means guiding customers to the best support channel for their issue and helping them follow a seamless path to getting the assistance they need.

• Smart self-service: Today's consumers are inclined to handle their own matters, which makes effective self-service a key component of a CXi approach. Contact centers should optimize their DIY solutions by using them for the right tasks, including plenty of contextual help in the design, and having a clear, seamless path to agent assistance.

• Empowered agents: Agents need to be empowered to help customers and have the necessary expertise to provide quick and accurate resolutions. This requires good coaching and training, as well as easy access to tools such as knowledge-bases and CRM systems through a unified agent desktop.

• Complete performance: The final key to a successful CXi strategy is operational excellence. Every aspect of the contact center - from workforce management to agent training to quality management - needs to run like a finely tuned machine. This requires contact centers to be dedicated to continuous improvement so that customers always have the best experiences possible.