Twenty years ago, in the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynn Truss wrote, “Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling.” Sadly, somewhere in the decades-long game of corporate culture tug-of-war, we have stumbled, thanks to missing punctuation. In our quest to “own” the customer, we have misunderstood the difference between our customer’s experience and a strategy known as customer experience (CX).

Punctuation, much like experience, matters. Yet in our dismissal of that critical apostrophe, we have diminished the importance and the power of CX, turning a revenue-driving business strategy into a function or a problem to be solved by technology. Before we lose the importance of CX to the heap of irrelevant business jargon, it is time to reclaim experience and embrace the opportunity (and responsibility) we all share for turning experience strategy into our customers’ (and employees’) most valued engagements.

Reclaiming experience

A customer’s experience is the accumulation of reactions to the variety of engagements and interactions that customer will have, over time, with a brand. These moments add up, and the sum of these sometimes emotional, sometimes ambient, and often uneventful moments builds to create a lasting perception about an individual’s attachment to that brand.

CX is an enterprisewide strategy that orchestrates an organization’s delivery of engagements and experiences purpose-built to establish a durable, profitable relationship with a customer. This enterprisewide team sport has functional groups and centers of excellence that most often represent the front line of successful CX strategy deployments—including Sales, Service (including digital service desks and contact centers), Commerce, and Marketing.

The contact center often is the first impression and the last word when it comes to how customers remember their experience with a brand. Agents can be the linchpin of an exceptional experience and can turn a negative moment into an opportunity for advocacy and loyalty. But the contact center isn’t the only source of experience: A creative campaign that sparks curiosity and interest, a salesperson with an almost psychic ability to do product selection, or a finance representative who calmly helps during an emotionally fraught moment also contributes to the customer’s experience. Everyone has a role to play, and every point across the corporate value chain can contribute to—or utterly derail—an experience.

Unleashing and harnessing the technology

Although CX strategy must be played as an enterprisewide team sport, the equipment needs of each player can and should be fit for purpose. In this modern age of open, composable cloud architectures, there is no reason that the core foundational platforms of front line teams can’t share a collective understanding of a customer’s current relationship with their company, sharing calendars, data, and outcomes.

This leads to key questions we—as a holistic CX strategy team—need to be asking of technology as we look to technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to turn our functional stacks into a connected CX growth engine:

• Do we need technology to form a solid or a dotted line? When we talk about the “front line” of CX, we often are thinking about teams within the contact center and service desk that, day in and day out, are ready to engage with customers to achieve optimal results. We have to talk about the “full line” of CX, especially those teams outside the contact center. We don’t need a line that will break— instead, we need a line that will move with growth, strategies, and people.

• Do we have the right data, or have we settled for what we could get? Organizations have settled for the customer data they can use or self-generate, as opposed to truly leveraging customer data from across the CX ecosystem. As Marketing, Service, and Sales have built their own technology estates, fiefdoms have emerged, with similar data gaps and disparities caused by CX ownership dilemmas. It’s time to personalize data strategies to deliver the right intelligence and right subsets of customer data to meet critical functional demands.

• When and where is silence truly golden? In CX discussions, the timing, content, and impact of the next-best action dominate as we map AI-powered automations to drive journeys and experiences forward. But have we mapped where the next action should be silence? Ambient experiences mark the evolution of AI and the value of automations beyond operational cost and time. Where and how are these moments of ambient exchange with customers changing the opportunity for the front lines of CX?

In this new age of customer collaboration, the contact center enters a new age of responsibility and business demand. Teams are expected to rapidly shift from a respond-and-react response model to a more proactive and predictive collaboration model in which customers and agents can cocreate new experiences and engagements in real time. With this shift comes the customer expectation that every engagement with a brand feels more like that rich 1-to-1 service experience they want to have when they connect with an agent in the contact center. However, from a technology perspective, this is often easier said than done.

There are numerous employees who sit outside of the contact center with “day jobs” in Customer Success, Sales, Finance, Supply Chain, or Marketing yet frequently engage in real-time voice or digitally based customer conversations. These “informal contact center” resources often are forced to cobble together the tools that are at the fingertips of the contact center agent. Although they strive to deliver superior experiences just like contact center agents and supervisors do, they don’t need the same tools as the contact center agent or supervisor.

Instead, there is a need for out-of-the-box, rightsized, purpose-built solutions for empowered functional experts or subject matter experts contributing to the success of CX regardless of where they “sit” in the organization. These teams or contributors should be empowered to handle customers effectively; surface the right data; and offer the same view of the customer across the organization, whether inside or outside the contact center. They should have access to the same powerful end-to-end customer interaction analytics to drive customer satisfaction. And the contact center, in turn, should have access to the fruits of all these experiences and interactions.

8x8, a global communications and collaboration services provider bridging unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact center as a service (CCaaS), recently introduced 8x8 Engage, which aims to deliver this rightsized, purpose-built solution to empower and more effectively meet the needs of CX professionals outside the contact center. But perhaps even more important than the solution itself is that 8x8 Engage is not a siloed or segmented island; it leverages the power and components of the 8x8 Experience Communications Platform to meet the needs of these users.

Looking into the CX future

Customer collaboration is just the tip of the CX iceberg that organizations need to prepare for—and, more pointedly, for which they need to establish tightly coupled strategy and technology blueprints. A good understanding of customers’ experience, combined with the drive to establish enterprisewide strategies, foundational platforms, and connected business applications, will help deliver on intentional actions to further solidify durable and profitable customer relationships.

This is the growth driver for the modern digitally enabled enterprise. I would go so far as to say that customers’ experience is the very foundation of the modern CX strategy. Instead of battling for control, ownership, or superiority, successful organizations are putting customer needs first and building strategies and stacks around those requirements to align the goals of the business with the expectations of customers.

Team sports require captains, coaches, star players, and deep benches chock full of skills and capabilities. This is true for the team sport of CX. Each coach will also be a player. Each star will be equally capable of holding down the bench. Every contributor on and off the field will fully understand their role and how they impact customers’ or employees’ capacity to engage more effectively. Impact will be more pronounced and profitable when the team operates in unison, understanding that it will be customers’ experience that most directly affects the organization’s goal of durable profitability.

So...choose your equipment to fit your team. Equip it to win in this game of intentionally influencing and impacting customers’ experience. The winning plays will be rewarding, and with a lot of practice and a little luck, everyone plays and the customers win.

*Liz Miller is a vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research focusing on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience (CX). is a vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research focusing on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience (CX).