Systems Integrator vs. Customer Experience Transformation Partner – Which Do You Really Need?

As more businesses realize that we're living in an experience economy, those organizations are prioritizing customer experience (CX) in their overall business strategy. These companies understand that today, differentiation happens on the basis of experience, not product or price, and they’re ready to transform the way they do business to capture the ROI that experience provides.

If you’re planning to make major improvements to your customer experience strategy and looking for an external partner, it can be tough to figure out what kind of firm will best serve your needs. Demand for CX consulting and technologies is high, which means many vendors and agencies are entering the space, looking to get their slice of the CX pie.

Some marketing agencies claim to have customer experience capabilities, but often lack the depth and breadth of a full service CX transformation partner. System Integrators (SI) can sometimes have a better grasp of CX as a whole, but they’re often only focused on implementing technology to solve acute problems. Once that’s done, the relationship often ends there.

If you’re looking for a full scope CX transformation, a better option is a true, end-to-end customer experience transformation partner with years of expertise and a strong foundation in CX.

A strategic advisor can help you assess the big picture and implement targeted improvements that will enable you to predict your customers’ needs, make data-driven decisions, and hit the right balance of design and orchestration you’ll need to make a long-term, effective change. That’s the thesis of how Avtex works with clients to focus on their CX evolution.

Benefits of Choosing a Customer Experience Transformation Partner Like Avtex

Go Beyond Reactive Solutions to Pain Points

Responding to customers’ acute pains is crucial, but your CX strategy should move beyond the simple reactive solutions and provide end-to-end exceptional customer experiences – CX that is aspirational to delight the customer. Only by predicting what your customers will want or need next - grounded in actual understanding - can you meet them where they are and deliver an experience that makes them feel seen and valued, sometimes before they even tell you what they need.

In order to preemptively meet your customers’ needs, you need to understand them as holistically as possible. Avtex can help you gain a 360-degree understanding of the entire customer journey, and then act on that understanding to provide frictionless CX that deepens your customer relationships, builds lifelong loyalty, and drives revenue.

Rely on a Strategic Advisor for Hyper-Focused Experience

The right consultant can bring a level of depth of understanding to your customer experience strategy that’s difficult to achieve without extensive, deep-dive experience in the field. At Avtex, we’ve been in the CX game since before it was even called CX – that’s nearly 50 years of actionable insight and expertise.

Customer experience is (or should be) a huge part of your organization, and it touches every aspect of your business. That’s precisely why it makes sense to bring on a strategic partner with targeted CX experience to help you make sure that your strategy is working on both a macro and a micro level

In addition to strategic guidance, a CX transformation partner helps you break down siloes and foster cross-department collaboration within your organization. At Avtex, for example, we bring together multiple departments and keep your customer top of mind as we consider their journey with various stakeholders throughout the business.

Make Data Driven, Customer-Centric Decisions

Developing a holistic understanding of your customer is paramount to fueling exceptional customer experiences. From Voice of the Customer programs to integrated data collection and analytics, Avtex can help you gain a clearer picture of your customer. It’s all part of our comprehensive approach to CX, which combines strategy, design, and orchestration to help your organization create hyper-personalized customer experiences that will differentiate you in the market.

Incorporate CX Design and Orchestration

A customer experience transformation consultant is along for the whole ride, from beginning to end. That journey requires a map – specifically, a CX improvement roadmap – which will be provided by your consultant during the design stage.

This roadmap lays out your entire transformation in an easily-followed set of steps, and then your partner walks you through the entire orchestration process, helping you make any necessary adjustments along the way. You don’t have to travel any part of the road alone.

If you want to make a truly radical change to your business’s customer experience – and reap the financial rewards of that change – you’re going to want more than a CX-geared marketing agency or a systems integrator who’s mainly focused on tech. You need a full-fledged, end-to-end transformation partner.

Our experts provide the strategic advising services of a marketing firm and the technological solutions of a systems integrator, but the difference is that we don’t stop there.

Avtex is here for you, every step of the way. We’ll bring our extensive collective experience to bear in helping you design exceptional customer experiences from end to end, and then we’ll build a customized plan to implement that design.