
CX Is More than Contact Center Software

Many businesses rely on contact or call center software and tools to automate and streamline customer communications. While contact center software improves operational efficiency—reducing hold and average handling times—it does not deliver the proactive, personalized communications necessary to improve the overall customer experience.
What Is Contact Center Software?
Contact center software enables inbound call queueing and routing, outbound dialing, call analytics, and workforce management. Call center software typically includes several features:
Automatic call distribution (ACD)
Interactive voice response (IVR)
Omnichannel support
Computer-telephony integrations (CTI)
The average customer spends 43 days of their lifetime on call hold, which leaves plenty of room for improvement in CX. Contact center software focuses on individual touchpoints (usually phone calls or emails) within the contact center, but is unable to analyze and manage the entire customer journey across multiple interactions and channels. For example, a payment IVR system simplifies bill payment but cannot send reminders or allow customers to pay via text (if that is the customer’s preferred channel). With the addition of artificial intelligence (AI), businesses can expand their self-service offerings and allow customers more ways to complete and upgrade their purchases.
Drawbacks to Contact Center Software
It offers limited personalization . Contact center solutions often lack the necessary data integration or analytics capabilities to understand customer history, preferences or context. Without that information, it’s virtually impossible to personalize communications. For example, when contact center or live chat agents don’t have access to information the customer already shared when describing the problem during a chat, they cannot tailor their interactions accordingly. Instead, the customer may have to repeat the same information again or receive generic chat responses that miss the mark. Both scenarios lead to frustration and a negative CX.
It provides inconsistent omnichannel support . Customers expect their interactions with a brand to be seamless across channels (phone, email, chat, social media and self-service). Contact center software may not deliver consistent, integrated experiences across these channels. Customers who start by chatting with the AI-powered chatbot may receive a different answer when they speak to a live agent 10 minutes later.
