By Yaniv Masjedi, Chief Marketing Officer at Nextiva
As businesses look for the best cloud technology to carry them into the new AI era, the most important goals are clear: deliver the best possible customer experience (CX) and maximize efficiency. When evidence comes along that certain steps can achieve both those results, it’s important to take notice. A new study does just that.
Published in the journal Integrated System and Management Technology, it shows what happened when enterprises merged two separate systems -- Customer Relationship Management: (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) -- into one.
First, their customer satisfaction jumped from 70% to 90%. While a 20-point hike is fantastic, that’s not even the biggest finding in this study. By unifying those systems, businesses also decreased time spent on manual tasks, “from 40 hours per week before integration to just 10 hours per week after.”
This kind of shift has exponential impacts across an organization. The study focused on enterprises, which are often defined as organizations with at least 1,000 employees. So it’s worth doing some quick math. If 1,000 employees spend 30 fewer hours a week on manual tasks, that's a savings of about 1.5 million hours across a year.
Multiply that for larger organizations. Have 10,000 employees? That's about 15 million hours in paid time.
The researchers found that the unification of these systems yielded more “personalized interactions facilitated by a unified view of customer data. Operational efficiencies were also realized through streamlined processes, better alignment of departments, and enhanced decision-making based on real-time, data-driven insights.”
It’s Time to Unify All CX Tools
If simply unifying two common tools delivers these results, imagine what happens when you unify all of them into a single cloud platform.
Many organizations use far too many tools. Nextiva’s survey, The Leader’s Guide to CX Trends, found that companies are using an average of 6.3 separate tools for customer interactions alone, including CRM, ticketing, collaboration, knowledge base, and analytics solutions. “When asked how many different tools their company has invested in for customer interactions, more than half the respondents said five or more.” The problem was consistent across large enterprises and small businesses.
The key is to get all of those disparate systems together into a single platform. And there's good news: The best enterprise communication platforms today do this. Built on UCXM (unified customer experience management), they create a complete view of each customer’s journey, across all platforms -- with no data left behind.
The study emphasizes how crucial that is. “Despite these positive outcomes, challenges such as system integration complexities, data fragmentation, and resistance to change were identified, which hindered the speed of integration and full utilization of the systems,” the researchers write.
These kinds of challenges are more likely to be found inside organizations that still use multiple tools, keeping data siloed. They’re much less likely to be found inside organizations that embrace UCXM and empower it to access all the necessary data.
A One-Team Mentality
As my team at Nextiva builds, and constantly updates, our unified communication platform, we’re keenly aware of how important the transition is for our clients. It’s common for organizations not to even realize how much data has been trapped over the years, depleting institutional knowledge.
This is why we work with our clients to ensure they’re putting the platform to its best use. Unification must include everyone in an organization, across all functions. From roles traditionally seen as “back office” to the team most likely to interface directly with customers, everyone should be on the same page at all times.
With a UCXM platform as the engine they run, every tool you use is empowered to deliver results. From intelligent virtual agents to chatbots to cloud contact centers, all the software operates with the same understanding of the customer. And as employees or AI receptionists gather new information, it all goes into the same record that everyone can access.
Security Increases
Understandably, some executives worry that information sharing internally can lead to issues involving privacy or security. But when a well-designed UCXM platform is in place, the opposite happens. Security is enhanced.
“The development of information technology encourages organizations to integrate various intelligent technologies into enterprise systems in order to improve system performance and security,” the researchers explain. “Technologies such as artificial intelligence, federated learning, and deep learning have been widely used to detect and anticipate various threats in organizational network systems.”
A quality UCXM platform also remains flexible and adaptable. That way, it can be agile in responding to new potential threats -- and in taking advantage of new ways to improve the customer experience even more.