Is your tech stack holding back your CX strategy? 6 questions

It’s counterintuitive but true—if you have too many applications in your tech stack, it can actually harm your CX.

Adding one point solution after another can leave customer data insecure, prevent employees from accessing the data they need for fluid customer service and create disjointed customer experiences.

Ask these six questions to determine if your tech stack is too complex.??

1. Do customers need to repeat themselves?

Examine your customer experiences. Do customers need to repeat themselves on successive contacts? If this is the case, you may have customer data scattered across multiple platforms that isn’t being shared to the right platform or agent at the right time.??

2. Is customer data secure?

If your on-premise hardware is not manually maintained and updated on a strict schedule, you may be compromising customer data. Top-tier modern cloud platforms offer data security and compliance as part of their services, which can offload the worry from IT and build customer trust.?

3. Do customers have to wait longer for service during peak times?

If so, you may not have the scalability you need for your CX tech stack. Point solutions pieced together have a hard time working together as it is, and it can be even more difficult if you need to quickly add human agents or expand digital channel capacity.?

4. Are you able to keep up with the operations schedules?

Consider the day-to-day tasks of your IT staff. First, are you able to keep up with the operations schedules of the entire tech stack—contract renewals, pricing schedules, software and hardware updates, etc.? If you often seem behind on critical deadlines, you may have too many point solutions to handle.?

5. Are you paying IT staff solely to support your tech stack?

If staff are spending all their time troubleshooting existing solutions, whether developed in-house or purchased, that may indicate you have too many different IT applications to manage.?

6. How would fewer vendors allow you to focus on other KPIs and boost productivity?

IT staff could devote more time to strategizing to support CX rather than simply putting out fires all day. This leads to higher IT job satisfaction and better employee and customer experiences because IT becomes a partner on the CX team instead of a support system fixing bugs.?

We answered yes. Now what do we do??

If your tech stack could use some pruning to operate more efficiently, there are three top principles to guide those decisions.?

Take an inventory of everything to find redundancies. Are there functionalities that could be fulfilled by more than one of your point solutions? Perhaps one of those solutions could be eliminated or reduced. Forrester summarized this audit in its 2024 Planning Guide .

Even if your budget grows next year, now’s not the time to pay for tools you don’t need today. Conduct a tech audit across CX—including customer service/contact center, digital and experience research, regardless of where they sit in the org—to understand where capabilities overlap. Then, plan for which programs to consolidate and which to sunset entirely. – Forrester

What can you replace that you had to build with something that you can now just buy? If your IT staff developed a program that’s running on your on-premise hardware, you may be able to replace it with a more agile cloud version that is maintained by the vendor.?

What are your organizational goals and how can improved technology bring you closer to reaching them? This leads to a discussion of not just replacing legacy technology with similar cloud technology but replacing that technology with something that’s better.?

Read the blog by Abby Klare Todd and the Lose the Baggage! Accelerate CX Innovation in the Cloud whitepaper for guidance on identifying too complex CX tech stacks and alternative solutions that bring all CX information together for incredible customer experiences.

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