The customer experience landscape is rapidly changing, and businesses must keep pace to exceed customer expectations. With customers becoming more demanding and switching providers when service deteriorates, call centers have evolved into contact centers and ultimately into customer experience (CX) centers, central to driving customer experience. This report—coauthored by Avasant and HCL Technologies—explores how CX centers have evolved into the next frontier of customer experience, and it defines strategies to ensure a positive and seamless customer experience.

But this sort of white glove customer experience might not be cost-optimal. Additional investments might be required to onboard new resources and reskill or upskill agents. To achieve the vision of the CX center, the solution must be a combination of technology, domain knowledge, and analytics to drive superior customer experience. This will increase revenue, improve customer retention, and drive higher first-call resolution. Ultimately, a higher percentage of incidents will be resolved in digital channels, reducing costs.

Our vision for the CX center comprises four themes: (1) agent enablement to deliver enlightened CX, (2) functional automation for efficiency and enhanced CX, (3) intelligent automation to reengineer customer services, and (4) intelligent analytics for better decision-making.

We conclude with ways in which organizations can reimagine their relationships with CX outsourcing service providers to create the right incentives for themselves and their partners. We also propose examples of better metrics as the basis for structuring CX outsourcing deals based on business outcomes. With businesses increasingly realizing that CX builds a competitive advantage, the time is right to move away from traditional metrics focused on performance and interaction to metrics based on business outcomes.