A detailed guide about “customer experience platforms”

Article Summary：If you aim to maintain customer satisfaction, retain more clients over time, and ultimately provide the finest customer experience, here’s what you need to be aware of.

Seeking a customer experience platform? Whether you’re heading your company’s customer experience (CX) team or an IT leader evaluating solutions, there are numerous details and considerations to take into account.

If you aim to maintain customer satisfaction, retain more clients over time, and ultimately provide the finest customer experience, here’s what you need to be aware of.

What is a “CX platform?”

Customer experience platforms, also known as CX platforms, are software solutions designed to help businesses manage and improve the interactions they have with their customers across various touchpoints. These platforms typically integrate customer data from multiple sources, such as CRM systems, social media, and customer feedback, to provide a comprehensive view of the customer journey. By leveraging advanced analytics and automation capabilities, CX platforms enable businesses to personalize their interactions with customers, anticipate their needs, and deliver a seamless and consistent experience across channels.

If you think you need a “CX platform,” here’s what you might actually be looking for…

Customer experience platforms, customer journey management platforms, customer engagement management (CEM) platforms, and customer relationship management (CRM), ect., there’s a ton of overlap between them in terms of functionalities and use cases. The tough thing about “customer experience” is that it’s so all-encompassing that you could hardly have a CX platform to cover every single customer touchpoint across every single step of the customer lifecycle.

If you think you need a “CX platform,” here’s what you might actually be looking for…

01 A Contact Center Platform

A good contact center platform typically encompasses both call center and real-time messaging (also called "live chat") functions, letting you to manage operations and communications for inbound customer support, proactive outbound service, outbound sales, live chat sessions, and social media messages.

For example, Udesk  is designed to do exactly this. Agents can make phone calls, have video meetings, send SMS/MMS + team messaging, and handle customer interactions across all social media channels, all from Udesk’s single customer service platform:

The advantage of having a robust solution that covers all these different missions and communication channels is, of course, that you can streamline workflows into one place, and train all employees on a single platform. That means agents and supervisors don’t have to keep toggling back and forth between different systems to pick up an incoming call or log an activity, or message a teammate with a question.

A few things to look out for in a contact center platform:

Scalability. Can you add and remove contact center agents, call queues, and manage phone numbers easily—without incurring added professional services costs? Udesk, for example, provides an administrator account for your customer service team, with full management authority over the entire team and platform. When the business grows or experiences seasonal fluctuations, the administrator can easily add and remove employees with just a few clicks in their cloud-based admin screen.

Artificial-intelligence-powered training and coaching. Busy supervisors can’t personally coach every single customer conversation. A good contact center solution should have AI features that help with this during calls and messaging! For example, Udesk's Agent Assistant could pop up tailored responses intelligently for tricky questions, right on agents’ screens so they get the information they need without putting more strain on managers.

Omnichannel functionality: Call center software lets you handle incoming phone calls, but what if you need to manage inquiries sent as social network messages, WhatsApp messages, or from other digital channels? If that’s the case, you’ll want Udesk's omnichannel platform, which will not only let your agents provide a good voice and digital experience, but also sync data and conversational context between all those channels.

Integrations. Most contact center teams use at least a few different apps and tools, whether that’s a CRM or help desk software. Your contact center platform should integrate with them to show agents relevant information during customer interactions and store customer history after the call. For example, Udesk has a huge library of automations with popular business software like Salesforce, CRM to link those systems, automate tasks like data entry, information inquiry, knowledge searching, etc.

Analytics. Ideally, your contact center platform has good analytics and dashboards built in, so you don’t have to contact professional services or support to help you pull data or reports. Udesk, for instance, has diverse dashboards that show real-time and post-call or post chats analytics like missed and abandoned calls or chats, and conversation duration:

02 A CRM Platform

A CRM solution is similar to a customer data platform and is essential for any customer experience team, be it Sales, Customer Support, or Customer Success.

It houses crucial details about customer relationships, from segmentation to past interactions, contact information, previous purchases, and everything else.

To provide personalized experiences, understanding everything about your customers is crucial, and most often, this knowledge resides within your CRM.

03 A Customer Self-Service Platform

This is one of the most important types of solutions that’ll help your agents and supervisors be more productive and efficient. If you’re like most businesses, the majority of the customer questions that come into your contact center are straightforward and repetitive, and don’t actually need an agent to answer it.

In these situations, it can be very helpful to have self-service automations like a chatbot.

Udesk's chatbot, for example, serving customer across various channels, including phone, email, chat, and social media, could instantly resolve 70% of customer's inquiries, only leaving the high-value and tricky problems to the human agents.

04 Help desk or ticketing systems

When it comes to customer experience platforms for industries like IT , manufacturing and hospitality, businesses often use some type of help desk or ticketing system to manage and track incoming customer requests.

Ticketing systems are helpful because they let you quickly assign inquiries or requests to specific agents, track which tickets have been resolved and which are still in a queue, and ultimately, optimize your processes over time.

Udesk's ticketing system, for instance, supports the agent create a ticket across all channels, including emails, calls, and media messages, etc. It automatically assign tickets to agents leveraging intelligent algorithms, considering factors such as current workload, skills, or utilizing the round-robin method for equitable distribution. Udesk efficiently manage SLAs by setting customized deadlines for ticket response and resolution, tailored to diverse business hours or specific categories. By sharing ticket ownership across teams and maintaining progress visibility, Udesk help the service team collaborate effectively.

4 questions to ask when looking for a customer experience platform

1. What are your business goals? What does your customer experience platform need to help you accomplish?

Are you looking to increase your customer retention rate? Upsell and cross-sell more effectively? Every company has different goals and metrics when it comes to their customer experience, and you should know what yours are before you invest in a customer experience platform.

2. Which channels does your customer journey cover?

What do your industry’s or business’ customer journeys and lifecycles look like? Again, every business is unique. Depending on the size of your business, preferences of your customers, and so on, you may need to optimize for different touchpoints like social media messages, live chats, and phone calls.

For instance, if your customers don’t really use social media to get in touch with you but prefer to call instead, then you should probably prioritize your phone experience over your digital experience.

3. How does your platform integrate with our other tools?

Integrations are important, but ideally, your customer experience platform should be robust and versatile. And this is true regardless of whether you’re talking about a CX platform or any other type of software. The more versatile a solution, the more tools you can consolidate. For many businesses that are paying for (and managing) hundreds of different apps, this can add up to huge cost savings. It's also worth noting the relationship between customer experience and artificial intelligence.

4. What’s your budget?

There’s a huge range of CX platforms at almost every price point imaginable. The good news is, whether you’re a price-sensitive startup or global enterprise, there will be a solution for you. The bad news: it can take a bit of time to find the right one.

What’s the best customer experience platform(s) for your business?

For most businesses and organizations, there won’t be just one “best customer experience platform.”

Depending on whether you need to manage high-volume communications with your customers or collect customer insights more effectively (or both), there are a few possible CX platforms that businesses may need.

And in many cases, you might use a few of them integrated together.

But, if your Customer Experience, Customer Support, or Sales team does need a customer service solution that can cover the Contact Center Platform, Ticketing System and Customer Self-Service Platform, and easy to be integrated with the third-party system, why not get a product tour of Udesk's AI-powered customer engagement platform?

》》Take our products for a spin—for free—to see how it can work for your business.

The article is original by Udesk, and when reprinted, the source must be indicated：https://www.udeskglobal.com/blog/a-detailed-guide-about-customer-experience-platforms.html