Frost & Sullivan Global Vice President Alpa Shah recently hosted a video webinar with an exceptional panel to discuss how customer experience (CX) is essential to every business. However, budgets and costs still get in the way. The panel included Richa Diwan, Director, Transformation Management Office, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina; Milos Djokovic, Managing Director, Eventus; Patty Drexler, Director of Enterprise Operations, Allstate Insurance Company; and Tom Hinds, Vice President, Global Contact Center Management, Mastercard. These CX industry leaders were uniquely qualified to educate participants.

The panel shared powerful insights on new ways to improve customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) and reduce costs simultaneously. They discussed how to generate a rapid return through shared risk, gain-share models, risk/reward cost transformation, and automation and bots.

The moderator polled a live audience (primarily consisting of executive-level decision-makers for large contact centers) throughout the webinar to understand their perspectives on budget struggles.

Frost & Sullivan's latest research showed that CX continues to be top of mind for companies across industries and regions. Besides dealing with COVID-19 issues, improving customer experience will be a top corporate objective from 2021 to 2022. CSAT is the primary metric measuring digital transformation. Given that, why are contact center projects still not top of mind when it comes to funding? What is stopping companies from investing in customer care? Frost & Sullivan's research shows that securing budgets seems to be the most challenging task. Another hurdle has been the complexity of the integration of legacy systems.

This insight shares winning strategies for contact centers that want to be a critical part of their organization's growth strategy from 2021 to 2022.

Author: Alpa Shah