CUSTOMER CONTACT WEEK
DIGITAL
CUSTOMER CONTACT WEEK DIGITAL
Building the Connected Experience
Keys to Unity in The Age of AI-Powered Customer Contact
WRITTEN BY: BRIAN CANTOR
SPONSORED BY:
Mandy Huckaby
GM of Global Commercial CX/ PLS Contact Centers
Conduent
Featuring Insights From Introduction
Celene Osiecka Head of CXM Product and Transformation Conduent
They have repeatedly stressed the importance of unity. They have routinely advocated for a focus on connections rather than transactions. They have frequently talked about the end-to-end experience.
Indeed, business leaders have long made clear their goal of an integrated, consistent, empowering customer contact framework. This desire to eliminate silos at every phase of the journey, and in every corner of the operation, has been the driving force behind many a strategic initiative and technology investment.
Unfortunately, this pursuit of unity is not paying off in practice. Friction and inconsistency are the norms in today’s customer engagement landscape, with only 22% of leaders confirming their business has an end-to-end approach to strategy and technology. The pain trickles down to the frontlines; 73% of businesses say their agents spend too much time on “non-interaction work” like data and knowledge lookups, and more than 81% of consumers feel their typical experience with a brand is “inconsistent.”
The introduction of AI is both spotlighting and exacerbating this challenge. A staggering 70% say integration difficulties have thwarted the success of their investments, whether by limiting use cases, stalling the implementation process, or
causing bad or inconsistent data to be “automated.”
“Our new demographics and the growing need of immediate satisfaction with low effort makes AI the “perfect” solution. But AI itself is a tool that requires human engagement, monitoring, and exploration. AI is not only exposing gaps rapidly; it can very well create new gaps of empathy, showcasing future opportunities to excel. If the underlying journey or foundational infrastructure is fragmented, AI can augment or compliment the process, but it will not magically fix it. Our focus at Conduent is to tap into the culture and customer experience of the interaction and create a sophisticated and eloquent solution to the broken processes. ”
- Mandy Huckaby, GM of Global Commercial CX/PLS Contact Centers, Conduent
The demands of today’s consumers necessitate an urgent solution. Today’s customers all-at-once expect a brand to reduce effort, increase personalization, and anticipate their future needs. They gravitate toward brands that want to connect with them yet know they cannot take too long to establish that connection.
This analyst report will reveal how to finally eliminate enduring sources of friction, unify the end-to-end experience, and cultivate lasting customer relationships. Regardless of whether the interaction is taking place, or whether it involves a human or AI agent, the experience will honor individual needs, reflect brand values, and build lasting connections.
Broken Journeys: 3 Reasons Experiences Remain Fragmented
When it comes to unifying the experience, the gap between rhetoric and reality is particularly evident. Less than 25% of consumers feel today’s experiences reflect the convenience, accessibility, and humanity implied by objectives like “reducing effort,” “increasing personalization,” and “demonstrating empathy.” Human agents utterly lack the foundation needed to become the “consultative brand advocates” they are supposed to represent in the age of AI.
The following three inhibitors explain why experience operations remain so broken.
Misguided metrics and performance management
Customers demand value, and businesses say they want to comply. But when it comes time to measure the success of their customer contact operation, they succumb to old-world habits.
More specifically, they adhere to a very superficial cost-cutting mindset, reducing major decisions and initiatives to shortsighted “efficiency plays.”
Instead of representing a way to scale customer centricity and increase access to quality support, digital and self-service environments become methods of deflecting customers and reducing call costs. Talk of employee empowerment falls similarly flat; the supposed desire to cultivate consultative relationship-builders proves hollow when leaders hold agents rigidly accountable for script adherence and metrics like average handle time (AHT), average speed of answer (ASA), and concurrency rate.
“The idea of ‘contact centers being cost centers’ is becoming a relic of the past. Driving innovation, expense shifts, and policy changes to create moments of revenue generation through upselling, subscriptions and retention are the future. When we do have the luxury of human to human interactions, we must take advantage of them. Checking the box, along with black & white models of control will be obsolete. We will need to make an emotional connection with full resolution for the customer. Until we can change the question from ‘how do we handle this contact cheaper?’ to ‘why are you contacting us?’, the devotion between customers & brands will be soft.”
- Mandy Huckaby, GM of Global Commercial CX/PLS Contact Centers, Conduent
The irony is that by introducing friction and inconsistency, the cost-cutting mindset often ends up hurting operational efficiency.
“A contact center can look efficient while the customer experience is getting worse. That is the danger of measuring speed without measuring resolution. If a customer leaves one channel only to repeat themselves in another, the work was never eliminated. It was redistributed. The next generation of CX leaders will not ask whether the contact was handled faster. They will ask whether the business removed a reason for the customer to contact them again.”
- Celene Osiecka, Head of CXM Product and Transformation, Conduent
Inherently inhibiting, this antiquated performance management view is made even worse by the strategic misalignment that is so common in today’s operations.
Separate teams, let alone departments, often have their own objectives and key performance indicators. Even if one group is demonstrating customer-centric values, if other departments don’t share them, the overall experience breaks down.
“Most fragmented journeys are built by capable teams making reasonable decisions. That is what makes the problem so hard to solve. Voice teams improve voice. Digital teams improve digital. Operations improves staffing. Finance improves cost. Each group can succeed by its own measures while the customer still experiences friction. Connected CX requires leaders to stop asking whether each function performed well and start asking whether the journey performed well.”
- Celene Osiecka, Head of CXM Product and Transformation, Conduent
Transactional approach to the customer experience
Today’s customer contact operations do not reflect a commitment to building relationships or unifying journeys. Instead, they reduce the customer experience to a series of individual transactions.
Organizations think of customers as faceless individuals dealing with a single issue, in a single channel, with a single intention. Success, in these cases, becomes about “answering the question” or “processing the transaction” rather than cultivating relationships of lasting value.
The ramifications of this reductive mindset are significant. For starters, it prevents the brand from properly understanding and honoring the unique nuances of customers and their journeys. They are unable to sufficiently recognize context and urgency, tailor individual conversations, demonstrate the appropriate amount of empathy, or deliver the best forward-looking recommendations.
Since they are pigeonholing the customer into a single “intention” with a defined service process, they also struggle to quickly and sufficiently adapt when the customer wants to change course. The end result is more friction – and less appearance of a connected, relationship-minded experience.
Disconnected systems and processes
Even when the organization gets the mindset right, its systemic framework may be very wrong. Operational friction runs rampant in today’s customer contact environments, and there are two distinct sets of consequences.
First, there is literal friction. Agents are forced to pore through numerous dashboards, tools, knowledge systems, and databases to support even the most basic inquiries. And given the level of complexity, inconsistency, and downright contradiction in today’s systems, this effort does not always even prove fruitful.
This trickles down to the customer in the form of undue hold times, repetitive questions, and a general aura of frustration, compounding the friction they were already experiencing in trying to navigate between the brand’s fragmented contact options.
“The biggest consequence is that customers feel the gaps. They repeat themselves. They get different answers in different channels. They are pushed from digital to voice without context. Agents inherit frustration they did not create, and customers feel pain they can’t afford. Each moment of friction is a cost in expense, ease and loyalty.”
- Mandy Huckaby, GM of Global Commercial CX/PLS Contact Centers, Conduent
The combination of repetitive questioning and agent disengagement also creates a perception issue. Customers do not sense recognition or appreciation, instead seeing themselves as issues that the brand is trying to address as impersonally and cheaply as possible. In turn, they have no reason to reward the brand with their lasting loyalty.
Bringing the Connected CX to Life: 5 Steps to Success
Historically, unity has eluded the customer contact function. Organizations have notoriously struggled to adopt an endto-end vision in which friction is low, personalization is high, and connections are powerful.
Presently, this outcome is immensely attainable. By taking the following steps, organizations will optimize technology initiatives, make customer centricity the driving force behind performance management, unlock human ingenuity inside and outside their contact center, and ultimately elevate every phase of the experience.
Go beyond “features” and focus on technology that fits
There is no shortage of theoretically innovative, functional technology available to today’s customer contact buyers.
Chasing “cool features” is not, however, the pathway to a connected customer experience. Success, instead, comes from identifying the technology that best fits one’s ecosystem.
Rather than marveling over flashy interfaces, savvy customer contact leaders will focus on the solution’s immediate and long-term integration capabilities, the learning curve, the resource needs, and, most importantly, the impact on actual customer interactions and employee workflows.
They will be certain that channels properly connect, ensuring customers, contextual data, and business knowledge are instantly and consistently accessible at all times, in all touch points. They will be certain that the technology they are implementing to strengthen the operation does not unintentionally fragment it.
“The least interesting question about AI is what the technology costs. The more important question is what the current experience is costing the business. How much demand is created by confusion? How much labor is spent compensating for broken workflows? How much trust is lost when customers receive inconsistent answers? AI ROI becomes much clearer when leaders measure the cost of leaving the experience unchanged. ”
- Celene Osiecka, Head of CXM Product and Transformation, Conduent
To center sourcing on these bigger questions, it is imperative to take a cross-functional approach to technology decision-making.
“AI decisions cannot sit with one team because AI does not stay in one lane. It changes the customer journey, the agent workflow, the data strategy, the compliance model, the staffing plan, the quality program, and the financial case. When CX, operations, IT, compliance, finance, workforce, quality, and frontline teams come together early, they stop evaluating technology as a standalone tool and start designing the operating model it has to live inside.”
- Celene Osiecka, Head of CXM Product and Transformation, Conduent
Beyond the potentially unseen costs, frictions, and challenges of the migration and implementation process, this level of collaboration cultivates the desired sense of “buy-in.” Since they were all involved in the decision, the various users and stakeholders will feel as if they have “skin in the game.” They will work vigorously to incorporate the technology into their daily workflows, while rigorously monitoring for unexpected challenges and optimization opportunities.
Make AI about transcendence, not transference, with an outside-in mindset
Elevating the customer experience takes more than just sourcing technology that works within the operating ecosystem. It is also about implementing solutions and initiatives that work for the company, its employees, and its customers.
This value-driven model is especially critical when implementing AI solutions. Far too many organizations focus on using AI to streamline or eliminate existing tasks, without sufficiently considering whether it actually elevates customer and employee experiences.
To avoid this pitfall, successful leaders focus on leveraging AI for transcendence rather than transference. Their goal is to make workflows better, not simply different.
After all, if customers are unhappy with a current experience, they are not going to suddenly become happier if forced to deal with a new platform that comes with a new learning curve, new sources of friction, and less conversation, all while delivering an equivalent or lesser outcome.
Customer-centric AI is about identifying the biggest limitations in the customer’s eyes. What parts of the journey are frustrating? When does it feel costly to have to wait for a live agent? What types of contacts do they wish they could receive? It is about deploying technology with an outside-in mindset.
As part of this journey, it is crucial to account for how AI will change customer behaviors and expectations, and how those changes will impact internal workflow.
If customers increasingly attempt to resolve a particular issue with an AI agent, they will primarily rely on human employees for additional assistance, special exceptions, or different issues altogether. This will simultaneously heighten the importance of seamlessly passing the customer’s context to the human employee and heighten the expectations surrounding that employee’s ability to demonstrate empathy and creative resolve.
A connected organization anticipates this outcome, and uses a combination of strategic workflow planning and AI assistance to prepare.
“AI has
a way of telling the truth about an experience. If the journey is clear, connected, and well designed, AI can make it faster, easier, and more scalable. If the journey is confusing or fragmented, AI will make those gaps impossible to ignore.”
- Celene Osiecka, Head of CXM Product and Transformation, Conduent
Measure outcomes – and their explanations
If the goal is to build connections and generate value, it goes without saying that outcome-oriented metrics become requirements. Brands must shift to thinking about customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and lifetime value. They must also think about the consequences for the employee experience, since their buy-in and continuity is so important. A connected organization anticipates this outcome, and uses a combination of strategic workflow planning and AI assistance to prepare.
“CX measurement has to grow up. For years, contact centers have measured motion: how fast we answered, how long we talked, where the interaction ended. AI makes those numbers even easier to produce, but easier measurement does not mean better insight. Leaders need to measure whether the customer made progress, whether the issue stayed resolved, whether trust improved, and whether the business learned something it can use to prevent the next contact. ”
- Celene Osiecka, Head of CXM Product and Transformation, Conduent
Operational health is foundational to success, which means operational metrics absolutely still matter in the era of the connected experience. But the key is to view them through the lens of the customer.
Rather than treating “average handle time” as the end-all, be-all benchmark without context, successful organizations will view them as a way to plan resources, uncover friction points, and assess the impact of new systems and processes.
They will also dive deeper into correlative efficiency drivers – pain points that have a direct consequence on employee productivity and customer satisfaction. Concepts like “number of repetitive questions” or “future callback rate” fit this bill perfectly, as they indicate a business’ success in using a connected CX to simplify the experience without sacrificing quality.
Eliminate agent friction and uncertainty
What happens behind-the-scenes directly affects what happens on stage. This reality explains why “happy agents equal happy customers” has become one of the customer contact community’s most ubiquitous adages. It also explains why a connected customer experience hinges on a connected employee experience.
Deploying customer-centric AI, leveraging actionable intelligence, and seamlessly connecting channels will be for naught if employees are not capable of thriving in this new environment. If they continue to fumble through knowledge, navigate complex tools, or ask repetitive questions, they will neither meet the customer’s standard for convenience nor robustness. They will not come across as if they are using omnichannel connectivity as a springboard for better understanding customer inquiries and better anticipating future needs.
Fortunately, leading AI solutions directly address key sources of operational friction, while meaningfully augmenting employee performance.
“If the agent has to search five systems, interpret unclear policy, rewrite notes, and guess what happened in the last channel, the customer will feel that complexity. AI creates a real opportunity to remove the burden around the agent so the conversation can become more focused, more confident, and more human.”
- Celene Osiecka, Head of CXM Product and Transformation, Conduent
Maximizing the impact of this technology hinges on three critical steps.
First, businesses will give frontline employees a seat at the decision-making table. Since they know existing operational pain points and customer experience challenges better than anyone, their insight will fuel the most astute technology purchases.
Second, it involves transparently redefining the future of their roles. AI technology has matured to the point where buzz phrases around “augmenting rather than replacing” are insufficient. Today’s customer contact leaders must precisely define what employees will handle, what new skills and mentalities they will require, and how they will use a combination of better hiring, training, and technological empowerment to get them there.
Finally, it involves bringing the idea of empowerment to fruition. Agent assist prompts cannot be reduced to fancy scripts; they should instead be springboards for letting the employee make adaptive decisions. Quality scorecards must meanwhile evolve to account for the nuance and humanity required of employee support in the age of AI.
Seek partners, not providers
More than a summation of a brand’s internal channels, touch points, and functions, the end-to-end experience accounts
Seek partners, not providers
More than a summation of a brand’s internal channels, touch points, and functions, the end-to-end experience accounts for the role of outside vendors and contributors. And with CMP Research data forecasting that contact centers intend to rely more heavily on outsourcing in the coming years, that role is a significant one.
When selected and managed incorrectly, outside entities can further fragment the customer experience. But when approached as partners rather than providers, they can be a powerful force for unity.
Successful partners are accountable for outcomes, but they view their role as much bigger than independently performing specific tasks or meeting certain quotas. They take a vested interest in the organization, its objectives, and its customers, using their resources, expertise, and operational prowess to generate value.
“A modern CX partner has to do more than execute the work. It has to help the client understand why the work exists, what it says about the customer journey, and how the operation should evolve. In the age of AI, partnership means bringing together strategy, technology, workflow design, measurement, and frontline insight so the experience improves over time instead of simply running at scale.”
- Mandy Huckaby, GM of Global
Commercial CX/PLS Contact Centers, Conduent
Modern partners think critically about how they fit into the organization’s ecosystem, and then they focus on optimizing it. In an AI-driven world, this may include helping the business validate whether a new technology purchase will fit seamlessly into the existing stack. It may involve anticipating what an increase in AI-based self-service will mean for workflow, and then empowering talent to fill any resulting gaps. It may also involve leveraging their own systems and data analysis methods to uncover and address root causes, lingering pain points, and new opportunities.
“BPOs are sitting on some of the richest customer intelligence in the enterprise. They see the questions customers ask, the policies they struggle with, the journeys they abandon, the workarounds agents create, and the reasons demand keeps returning. When that intelligence is used well, the BPO becomes more than an execution layer. It becomes a source of strategy, design, and continuous improvement.”
- Mandy Huckaby, GM of Global Commercial CX/PLS Contact Centers, Conduent
Taking Action: 10 Critical Questions on the Road to Success
Committed to the partner mindset, Conduent prides itself on helping clients build the connected experience.
“The contact is only the symptom. The real CX work is finding the cause: a confusing policy, a broken handoff, a missing answer, a disconnected system, or a journey that asks too much from the customer. The best CX partners can see the full system and connect people, process, technology, data, and measurement to turn those signals into outcomes customers can feel and businesses can measure.”
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Mandy Huckaby, GM of Global Commercial CX/PLS Contact Centers, Conduent. t.”
Befitting that holistic approach to advisory and partnership, Conduent recommends customer contact leaders ask the following ten questions as they review their experiences, evaluate new technologies, and take action.
1. What customer problem are we solving, and how will we know it is solved?
2. Where does this technology fit in the actual journey, before and after the interaction?
3. What systems, data, workflows, and knowledge sources does it need to connect to?
4. What happens when the AI cannot resolve the issue?
5. How does context transfer to the agent?
6. How will this change staffing, training, QA, coaching, and performance management?
7. What new failure points could this create for customers or employees?
8. How will we measure success beyond containment or adoption?
9. What governance is required for accuracy, compliance, privacy, and brand trust?
10. How will we continuously optimize after launch?
About the Author
Brian Cantor, Principal Analyst & Director, CCW Digital
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Brian Cantor is the Managing Director of Customer Management Practice’s Digital division. Driven by a passion for helping brands better empower their employees and more meaningfully connect with customers, Brian oversees research, product development, editorial vision, and commercial strategy for properties like CCW Digital and Customer Engagement Insider. Reaching a community of almost 200,000, these digital properties offer industry-leading commentary, research reports, and virtual event sessions.
Far from a “boardroom manager,” Brian routinely speaks at leading customer contact events and directly engages with global enterprises and innovative start-ups via training and advisory services sessions.
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