(Editor's Note: The following post was written for 8x8 by Metrigy CEO and Principal Analyst Robin Gareiss)

We have all been the recipients of really spectacular—and really lackluster—customer experience. Unfortunately, lackluster experiences far outnumber spectacular ones.

Let’s face it, delivering consistently five-star customer experience isn’t easy, given the wide range of customer issues and the availability of resources. Many factors cause the deficit in interactions that deliver the ‘wow’ factor—poor leadership, low budgets, lack of analytics to guide decisions, mediocre training, and/or ineffective technology, including applications, hardware, and communications.

Despite these shortcomings, most business and technology leaders acknowledge how vital customer satisfaction is to business success, according to Metrigy’s Customer Experience Transformation global research study of 724 companies. For the third straight year, they ranked customer satisfaction the top business priority—more important than product/service quality, revenue generation, information security, employee retention, and investor satisfaction.

Many also are allocating budget behind their top priority: 65% of companies plan to increase CX spending by an average of 24% this year, according to Metrigy’s 2023 Technology Spending Forecast global research study of 400 companies. Our research success group (those with above-average business metric improvements through the use of new CX technologies) spends nearly twice as much on CX technologies than the non-success group ($2,691 vs. $1,400 per employee on average).

The old adage of “You have to spend money to make money” holds true. Those whose revenue increased in 2022 through the use of conversational AI, visual engagement, or platform integration spent from 52% to 104% more on CX technology per employee than those who didn’t see a revenue increase.

Gaining a Competitive Edge by Being Customer-Obsessed

A common thread among virtually every company that consistently delivers exceptional customer experience is the execution of a CX technology strategy that delivers results. They embrace the right combination of communications channels (voice, video, webchat, SMS, and virtual assistants) and AI-enabled applications, along with customer insights and analytics to give them the data they need to perfect their technology decisions.

These ‘customer-obsessed’ organizations develop workflows and processes to leverage their technologies and staff—but they do so with regular customer feedback to align technology adoption and utilization with customer demands and preferences. They are transforming not only their technology strategy, but how they provide customer service.

CX Transformation Drives Business Success

Like it or not, most companies are in a transformational era, whether they’re embracing it openly or being dragged kicking and screaming. Customer demands have and continue to shift, while employee preferences and expectations are dramatically changing. And the two are inextricably linked.

Customer-obsessed companies welcome these changes with excitement, assertiveness, and strategic thinking. They know it takes more than just an interest in customer success, or a few employee surveys to gain competitive advantage and earn top satisfaction scores. At the foundational level, they have strong leaders, executive-level support, bullish budgets, and data-led decision-making. All these factors help as they start their CX transformation projects.

What is a CX transformation project? It’s the innovative application of a new or existing technology that changes how customers engage with a company, results in a better experience, and ultimately drives measurable value to the company.

More than half of companies were engaged in a CX transformation project in 2022. Our research participants cited several transformation initiatives, including the following:

  • Adding cloud-based applications (41.5%)
  • Improving customer self-service capabilities (38.3%)
  • Establishing high-performance work-from-home capabilities (34.4%)
  • Adding analytics to improve agent performance (32.9%)
  • Improving fraud prevention (32.2%)
  • Integrating contact center with other apps (UC, CRM, CPaaS) (30.7%)
  • Adding conversational AI/chatbots (28.7%)
  • Adding Voice of the Customer surveys (28%)
  • Adding management tools to improve voice, video, or network performance (27.8%)
  • Improving agent scheduling and capacity planning (27%)
  • Adding visual engagement (video, screen sharing, co-browsing) (24.6%)
  • Reducing the number of live agent calls (18.7%)
  • Adding biometrics (18.4%)

And along with all of those projects, successful companies also are focused on improving agent performance, with 50.5% training them on being empathetic to customers and 53.9% seeing value in using agent assist to help resolve customer issues.

Supporting Success With Integrated Communications Platform

With all the C-suite-level attention (and funding) pointing toward customer experience, it’s important to understand the value of a comprehensive communications foundation. Contact center agents are no longer on an island among successful companies; they’re integrated in with the rest of the company.

This manifests in a few ways. First, 45.7% of companies are giving contact center licenses to employees who aren’t full-time agents. Employees in sales, marketing, product development, HR, the C-suite, and legal are leveraging contact center licenses to review customer insights, communicate directly with customers, or run internal communications for HR or IT. At the same time, contact center agents are using team collaboration applications to provide insight into marketing campaigns, product development, and even sales strategies. And, they use video, screen-sharing, chat, and voice to bring experts into calls when needed. Additionally, businesses can optimize their sales processes by implementing tools like a sales commission calculator for accurate and efficient commission management.

In fact, 54.2% of companies have integrated their unified communications (UC) and contact center platforms, while 43.5% are integrating UC, contact center, and Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) platforms. The integration helps to ensure customers get issues resolved as quickly as possible, with an agent or someone outside the contact center, and using the communications channel that makes the most sense. For example, a customer calling in with an application issue will be much better served with screen-sharing or video than with voice or chat. Integration with a UC platform makes that possible.

Though 57.3% of companies say “digital-first” would be their strategy by the end of 2022, 73% of all interactions either start in or must be escalated to voice. Successful companies find that integrating communications platforms not only helps them expand interactions to all employees in an organization, but it also gives customers more options as they shift to new channels in their journeys.

Successful companies are documenting impressive success when they integrate UC and contact center: Customer ratings improve by 26.5%, operational costs drop by 18%, revenue increases by 22.6%, and employee productivity improves by 23.1%, according to the Customer Experience Transformation study.

Spending time to build a reliable and integrated communications platform provides the foundation customer-obsessed companies need to add advanced applications and deliver the coveted five-star experience.

ABOUT METRIGY: Metrigy is an innovative research firm focusing on the rapidly changing areas of Unified Communications & Collaboration (UCC), digital workplace, digital transformation, and Customer Experience (CX)/contact center—along with several related technologies. Metrigy delivers strategic guidance and informative content, backed by primary research metrics and analysis, for technology providers and enterprise organizations.