Beyond Unified Communications: Why UCXM is the New Gold Standard

By Yaniv Masjedi, Chief Marketing Officer at Nextiva

For years, businesses have talked about the importance of omni-channel communications. They’ve recognized the need to interact with customers across as many channels as possible, and integrate all those conversations into a single experience. That helped give birth to Unified Communications as a Service, as the alliance has explained.

In our work at Nextiva, we’ve taken a different approach. Rather than UCaaS, we believe that what businesses need is UCXM: a unified customer experience management platform. The distinction isn’t semantic; it’s about the core of what the business does.

Nothing is more fundamental to success than delivering the best possible customer experience. Our survey, The Leader’s Guide to CX Trends, polled more than 1,000 decision makers at companies across a range of industries. Virtually all (96%) said their company now recognizes that CX is a key driver of business outcomes; 89% said leadership understands the impact of CX on business results.

All hands on deck

The customer experience is about more than communications with the customer. To deliver the highest quality CX, your cloud contact center software needs to bring together all parts of the organization -- including those that might never interact with the customer directly.

Units that have traditionally been thought of as “back office” are now vital parts of a customer’s journey. We asked leaders which departments come to mind when they think about delivering a great CX. Three quarters named functions like operations, IT, legal, finance and more.

“The type of experience customers now expect requires involvement well beyond the customer service team,” the study explains. These findings acknowledge “the reality that what happens behind the scenes has a profound effect on customer satisfaction and retention.”

By placing UCXM at the heart of their operations, businesses create a one-team mentality around the core goal. It’s not just about synthesizing interactions with the customer into a single record; it’s about creating a system in which everyone, across the entire organization, collaborates to optimize the customer journey for each individual. No one is left out.

Fewer silos

This guiding philosophy, that CX is for everyone, also helps cut back on data silos -- a problem that continues to plague businesses.

“Data silos remain one of the most persistent obstacles to effective data management for AI,” TDWI (Transforming Data With Intelligence) reports. “Fragmented data across clouds, business units, and platforms limits visibility, trust, and scalability. Without consistent unified data access, it is difficult to deliver on the promise of AI.”

Organizations are spending massive sums of money to try to tackle the problem. The data integration market reached an estimated $16.7 billion last year, and is expected to nearly double by 2031, according to TechSci Research. “As enterprises manage increasingly high volumes of complex data, the requirement to eliminate information silos and ensure operational efficiency acts as a fundamental catalyst for growth,” the firm says in its report.

Clearly, many of those investments are failing to deliver. Through the work I do, I’ve seen one of the biggest reasons: Some parts of the company aren’t included. They’re seen as having separate roles, not part of the communication with customers, and therefore stuck in separate systems.

Having UCXM as your cloud communication platform transforms that. Everyone shares information in real time. This can be done without sacrificing customer privacy or security. In fact, a well designed unified customer experience management platform has the most up-to-date protections built in.

When this happens, businesses become more unified internally and more customer-focused at the same time. So it’s no surprise that they build better customer journeys. As a study put it, “When integrated into a unified customer experience management platform,” AI systems create comprehensive emotional profiles of customer interactions. “This allows multinational e-commerce platforms to achieve hyper-personalization.”

Since we started working with clients to move them into a UCXM era, the results have been clear. Organizations reap rewards. As my colleague Tomas Gorny, Nextiva CEO, often says, customers no longer compare businesses to their competitors; they compare their experiences with businesses to the best experiences they’ve had with any kind of business.

So providing the best CX is like the Holy Grail. And UCXM is the way to get there.