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 a traditional CX management approach, where dispersing responsibilities across different departments can create 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 ways 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.

How NICE can help you execute world class CXi

NICE is the market leader in providing customers the cloud contact center software they need to deliver consistently exceptional customer experiences. Capabilities include the following (and more):

• Modern ACD providing digital first omnichannel routing and increased business agility

• Integrated and comprehensive workforce management solutions to engage and empower contact center agents to achieve business goals

• Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to enhance the customer experience and automate routine agent tasks

• Omnichannel customer journey orchestration to enable customers to move seamlessly across support channels.

CXone provides an intelligent, unified suite of applications covering the breadth of contact center management disciplines, simplifying administration and streamlining the user experience.