Why Call Centers are critical
to Digital Experience Platforms
The phone is still key to customer service. Now customer
retention and satisfaction are the forefront of the next marketing
frontier. A DXP can’t do its full job without a call center solution.

Contents
Executive Summary

3

Customer service and marketing

4

The limits of self-serve tools and content

5

End to end data, and the power of emotion

6

Powerful new evolution in the call center market

7

Why Call Centers are critical to Digital Experience Platforms

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A new phase of the digital marketing age is upon us, with e-mail, live chat, IVR
phone solutions, and AI-driven chat bots promising to make customer support more
efficient than ever before. Does that mean that the need for a staffed call center iscoming to an end?
Studies demonstrate that the answer to that question is an emphatic no. While theabove tools provide valuable ways to offer more support to more people, users arestill calling in for help with things when they don’t want to use automated systems,
need multiple problems solved, or they’re frustrated by available options.
Seeking support still represents a key potential tipping point in customers’sentiment towards an organization. It’s essential that trained agents, augmented by
AI and other smart call center technologies, are there for them.
At the same time, the customer journey is undergoing permanent change – online
review sites and the pre-outreach research trend make customer satisfaction notjust about stopping churn, but also a key marketing metric. Advocacy has neverbeen a more powerful force for driving sales.
Not only that, but as more and more products move to subscription/cloud-basedmodels, customers are no longer making single purchases, but instead making
regular decisions to continue with a service. They can essentially stop buying at
any time, and competitors are looking to take advantage of that with incentives,advertising, and more.
Now customer service and marketing walk hand in hand, and that means thatmartech needs to encompass customer service in order to truly cover the wholejourney. There are major boons to be gained by being able to track and analyze end
to end, and emerging call center technology allows emotion and sentiment analysis
for a more complete picture. A true Digital Experience Platform then, by definition,needs call center functionality.

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“Disjointed experiences

The Digital Experience Platform (DXP)

cost millions and lose

Key marketing tools, such as CMS, CCM, DAM, and more are starting to reach aconfluence in the market, coming together to form a new breed of platform: theDigital Experience Platform (DXP).

customers. Growth comesfrom continued use ofyour product.”-Forrester 1

Orchestrating a cohesive, contextual experience across channels that meets brandstandards, while delighting customers, is a massively difficult task. DXPs take thesedisparate solutions and integrate them together to form an even more powerfulwhole, capable of offering effective brand control with personalization at scale
across the entire customer journey.
Customer-centric businesses are investing in DXPs to help their marketing andoperations teams deliver, but there’s another frontier that’s becoming relevant to
the DXP definition: customer service.

Customer service and marketing
While marketing departments have traditionally focused on the acquisition partof the journey, times are changing. Companies are realizing that not only iscompetition to acquire new sales ever-increasing, but it’s also getting harder andharder to keep the customers they already have.
Competitors are devoting a lot of effort to poaching customers with advertising andincentives, and they’re doing it with good reason: customer bases are proving tobe quite vulnerable. Studies show that roughly 65% of consumers will switch to acompetitor after just 1-2 poor experiences. That percentage increases to 88% after
1-3 poor experience2 .
Cloud subscriptions extend the journey
The events of 2020 have hit the gas for many organizations’ cloud migration
strategies as they look to cover remote employees, keep onsite IT requirements
down, and transition to OpEx pricing. This is a big opportunity for companies withcloud/SaaS deployment options, but also influences the customer journey.
While cloud solution sellers often benefit from “lock-in” designs like walled garden
architecture and extensive storage, the fact remains that subscription customers
are making continuous buying decisions rather than single ones. Outside of thebounds of a contract, they can walk away at any time. That means recurring
decision points. Marketing and customer support have to work together to keepthem happy enough to keep putting their money on the table.
Customer service as marketing
That said, customer service isn’t just about playing defense with the customers you
have. Existing customers can be some of the most powerful forces for good, or ill,in terms of new customer acquisition. Today’s users do a lot of research before theyeven show up on your radar as prospects, and one of their most important steps islooking to see what others are saying about you.

1 Accelerating out of the crisis report © 2020 Forrester Research, Inc. 2
2 “Future of the Contact Center: A Forecast” – Brian Cantor - https://www.customercontactweekdigital.com/
customer-experience/whitepapers/november-market-study-future-of-the-contact-center-a-forecast

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Expert product reviews or coverage by independent analysts are both importantsources of truth for people who know the category. However, people also set a lotof stock by what people who are most like them have to say. That means your othercustomers. The web is making it ever easier for these people to let their voices beheard…which means good customer service has become a sort of advertising, even
if the budget comes from a different department.
That means that Digital Experience Platforms that truly cover the entire customer
journey have to be involved in support and service as well.

The limits of self-serve tools and content
There’s no question that self-service web content, IVR tools, and chatbots are all
becoming essential parts of a modern customer support deployment. The potential
savings in staffing costs and caller wait times are significant.
However, the human touch of one-on-one support is still very important and often
the final defense against a bad customer service experience. Here’s why.
IVR/bot-driven self-service helps, a lot, but it isn’t for everyone
IVR and AI-driven customer tools are becoming ever more important for a reason– they allow customers to interact with your organization on their timeline (e.g.
outside business hours) and take the stress off service staff. However, they’re not foreveryone. A ContactBabel study3 surveyed organizations with call centers about why
their customers were asking for live support from the midst of self-service tools:
Speech recognition is notaccurate / user-friendly

5%

14%

Excessive secuirty questions

4% 4%

Too many options

9%

The self-service function does
not offer what they want

71%

10%

27%

18%

34%

23%

15%

The customer does not trust the system

15%

34%

26%
0%

13%

33%

10%

Strongly agree

22%
20%

30%

agree

40%
Neutral24%
50%Disagree

60%

6%

13%

13%

2% 6%17%70%

80%

Strongly disagree

4%
90%

7%
100%

Don’t know / NA

Figure 1: Reasons for abandoning self-service sessions

3 ContactBabel, “The Inner Circle Guide to AI, Chatbots & Machine Learning”, 2019

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Many customers won’t use self-service web support
The same ContactBabel survey also discovered that a huge proportion of callers
had not even attempted to use web self-service content prior to their call.

Don’t know

15%

Less than 10%

31%

More than 50%

8%26-50%

15%
11-25%

31%Figure 2: Proportion of self-service sessions ‘zeroed-out’ to an agent
Regardless of their reasons for going around self-service and automated support
options, once they’ve done so customers are clearly looking for the active, personal
help of a real human being. Frustrating them at this stage (especially if they’ve
already tried your other options) can strike a major blow to their satisfaction withyour brand. One that they’re likely to complain about to others.

End to end data, and the power of emotion
A modern call center solution that integrates with your DXP offers another huge
potential benefit – maintaining the flow of data throughout the entire journey.
Today’s customers use many communication channels and touch points, but mostbusinesses can’t understand the patterns and trends within those interactions orcompile them for sharing with decision makers.
Moving beyond disparate customer interaction data to aggregating cross-channelinteractions collectively provides a far more comprehensive picture of customer
behaviors. The power of a cohesive vision into how your customers interact and feelthroughout the journey lies in its ability to inform process improvements, training,and even new product development.
According to a McKinsey survey, businesses that report extensive use of customer
analytics are:• 112% more likely to have higher sales growth than their competition• 115% more likely to report higher ROI figures• 93% more likely to have higher profits than their competition• 82% more likely to have higher sales than their competition

Why Call Centers are critical to Digital Experience Platforms

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So there are substantial advantages to be gained through achieving a better
understanding, but how do you get there?
While it’s true that without a contact center integration you’re still getting data
(views, open rates, click through rates, etc.) – enterprise grade call center solutions
can add natural language processing of recordings, sentiment analysis beyond calls
into social media, and other incredibly valuable insights. Customers haven’t stopped
talking, and you need to be able to hear what they’re saying.
These sorts of analytics can bring you insights into an incredibly important human
metric: emotion. When are customers stressed? When are they annoyed? When arethey happy? If you’re simply looking at where and when they click, it can be hard to
discover the why they click.
The more you can understand your customers at every step of the journey, the more
you can refine the journey to reduce costs, improve retention, and introduce crosssell/upsell opportunities at exactly the right point. To maintain the chain of datafrom end to end, you need a modern call center solution that integrates with therest of your DXP.

Powerful new evolution in the call center market
The modern call center – much more than a phone
While the core job of the call center agent remains the same, massive advances
have been made in technology that makes those agents more efficient andeffective. OpenText™ Qfiniti™ is an industry-leading call center solution thatcombines recording tools, AI-driven analytics, speech and sentiment analysis,compliance/privacy tools and more.
Understanding the customer with AI-driven insight
OpenText™ Explore allows organizations to deploy powerful Voice of theCustomer features such as surveys; speech analytics; and AI-driven insight
as well as sentiment analysis across social media, call center interactions, text
communications and more. As a result, training, messaging, workflows and otherkey elements can be more informed and better designed.
Reaching your customers where they arePart of providing a stronger customer experience is proactive outreach and follow
ups. Customer Communications Management (CCM) takes this task, previously
either time-consumingly manual or customer-annoyingly one-size-fits-all, into themodern era.
OpenText™ Exstream™ allows messages to be broadcast to your customer baseformatted and transmitted to suit their preferences. Whether they prefer voice calls,email, SMS texts, or digital faxes (still key to B2B communications), Exstream will
follow their preferences on a one-to-one basis as it moves down the list, while also
personalizing each message based on your customer records (name, account info,registered products, etc.).

Why Call Centers are critical to Digital Experience Platforms

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Plot the entire customer journey to spot trends and opportunities

OpenText Qfiniti
OpenText Explore	OpenText Core
Experience Insights

Data can be an incredibly powerful tool for spotting problems, opportunities, andtrends. Unfortunately collecting it and making sense of it are two very different
challenges. The more information you bring in, the more ground you have to coveras you hunt for insights.
OpenText™ Core Experience Insights helps you visualize the entire customer journeywith segmentation, data sets, drilldown analysis and monitoring. Then take what
you’ve learned to Exstream, TeamSite, and/or Qfiniti to use your discoveries toorchestrate and automate actions based on customer behavior.

About OpenText
OpenText, The Information Company, enables organizations to gain insight throughmarket leading information management solutions, on-premises or in the cloud. For
more information about OpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX) visit: opentext.com.

Connect with us:• OpenText CEO Mark Barrenechea’s blog
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