Contact center solutions are ruining your customer service experience

There’s a very old story about a group of blind men who hear that there’s an elephant nearby. Curious about what kind of creature this could be, they all go to the elephant and touch it so they can experience this animal they’ve only heard about. The blind man touching the elephant’s trunk says, “An elephant is like a thick snake.” The blind man touching the leg says, “No, an elephant is like a giant pillar.” The blind man touching the tusk says, “You’re both wrong, an elephant is smooth and shaped like a spear.”

This is how your Sales, Marketing, and Service organizations see your customer. Each department uses different technology to collect different data viewed through different dashboards optimized for different KPIs. When data in one silo becomes useful to another, an act of IT is required to transfer the data in a bespoke way to satisfy a specific use case. Sometimes you need a new solution just to manage all the integrations.

But that’s an internal problem for the company, right? That happens in the background. It doesn’t impact customer service.

FALSE. Your customers feel every bump in the road.

If someone complains about your product on social media, they can be contacted by your Social Engagement team in one way, by Customer Service in another way — while receiving ads and emails from you about that product.

The inability to coordinate these efforts makes customers feel like you don’t know them except as targets on a chart. It doesn’t inspire them to come back.

Every vendor with a contact center solution claims they unite Sales, Marketing, and Service, but it’s a smokescreen. Here are three claims that all vendors make. (And why they’re nonsense.)

“Trust us to know customer service. It’s all we do!”

This is a warning flag. It means they haven’t invested in expertise to develop use cases for Sales and Marketing. Pay close attention to the customer journeys they describe. If all of them start with “A customer becomes frustrated with your product/service…” then you’re evaluating a siloed point solution that perpetuates the problem.

“We have Sales and Marketing use cases!”

Do they? Contact center solution vendors are notoriously weak at this, and any close inspection will reveal it. Ask to see a list of all their use cases. If their list of Service use cases is 5x times longer than the lists for Sales and Marketing combined, then you’re evaluating a siloed point solution that perpetuates the problem.

“BYOT. We can integrate whatever you want!”

Yikes. That’s how you got into the solution silo nightmare you’re in now. Integrations between systems are expensive to deploy, troublesome to maintain, and only address a few use cases at a time. Ask how many vendor relationships you’ll need to manage in order to connect all your channels and functions for customer engagement. If the answer is two or more, then you’re evaluating a siloed point solution that perpetuates the problem.

Stop solution silos from destroying customer relationships

Contact center solution vendors can’t solve point solution madness. They can only perpetuate the problem.

Check out how Sprinklr Service works within a Unified Customer Experience Management (CXM) platform that truly unites Sales, Marketing, and Service functions in a single codebase with the most complete view of the customer on the market.