Article by Alistair Niederer, CEO Ember Group North America
CXTech defines the wide and mature use of technology to assist in customer experience (CX). Examples of traditional players in the CXTech market are those providing Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chatbots, Virtual Assistants, AI Fueled Speech Analytics (CallMiner) and Robotic Process Automation (UiPath, Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere).
Covid-19 has forced a revolution in supporting customers making ‘Work from Anywhere’ an essential element of customer management and we need to ensure we include players in the GigCX space (LiveXchange, Limitless, LiveOps, Arise, Working Solutions) to CXTech. The brains behind total workforce flexibility.
Covid-19 has forced a revolution in supporting customers making ‘Work from Anywhere’ an essential element of customer management
The valuable ‘Tech’ suffix for businesses providing game changing technology and solutions really began with the challengers in financial services – the Fintechs (Financial Technologies). Using smart thinking, businesses like TransferWise (now valued at over $5bn) have challenged the traditional model of international funds transfers – a much more efficient and cheaper alternative to the big banks. Borderless and democratized banking – their branch is everywhere.
Then there is InsurTech. The poster child Lemonade is telling us to forget all that we know about insurance. We now expect simple and involved App-based insurance services – from buying to managing to claiming to settlement. No longer do you need to call an insurance company to tell them of an accident – your smart car will already have sent all data (including specific time, damage, weather, traffic and road data) to the insurer. This dramatically shortens the time to get you back to where you were before the accident.
Customer Service is undergoing a dramatic revolution. Needing to rapidly move customer service from office to home (whether in-house or outsourced) we now see clearly the future – CXTech.
This is a flexible and balanced view of where people work from. It is not about work-from-home or work-from-anywhere – it is about anyone helping anybody from anywhere at any time. We are dramatically seeing the democratization of customer service where human involvement is required – delivering that touch using the channel of the customer’s choice – voice, chat, text, email, social.
Behind the curtains is the CXTech company. By listening to the preferences of those supporting customers – there needs to be a well-tested, mature range of service platforms that can manage the many categories of people helping people in a totally secure, cloud-based environment.
We now see clearly the future – CXTech…
‘People’ is no longer defined as full time, fully employed, contact centre agents either in house or outsourced and either in a contact centre or at home. ‘People’ can now be traditional in-centre or home-based full-time agents, part time agents, contractors, brand ambassadors helping their peer customers and being paid for it. It can also be non-support staff given the opportunity to get closer to their customers by spending flexible hours from home or office.
With the rise of CXTech comes the necessity to ‘listen’ to your ‘people’ and their preferences. This means treating them as individuals having them manage their preferred time to work – days, hours, work type based on experience and preference – and paid accordingly – as an employee, as a contractor, as part of normal salary or paid with goods or services as an advocate of the brand.
With the rise of CXTech comes the necessity to ‘listen’ to your ‘people’ and their preferences.
All of the tried and tested ‘traditional’ service layers and support remain – and now made a whole lot more complex to manage the necessity for managing Anyone from Anywhere at Anytime.
