Beyond the contact centre: why customer experience has become an enterprise technology strategy

For much of the past two decades, customer experience lived in a silo. It was the domain of the contact centre — a cost of doing business, managed separately from the systems that ran the rest of the organisation. That era is over. Today, customer experience has moved to a new phase driven by a convergence of AI, cloud technology, and hard-won lessons about what it actually takes to retain customers in a competitive market.

One company that has come to intimately understand this shift is Nexon Asia Pacific, and to gain some insights into where things are going, Technology Decisions spoke with David Russell, General Manager of Customer Experience – Business Development at Nexon Asia Pacific. With over 15 years of experience in unified communications and collaboration, he is a sought-after speaker at customer and trade events, sharing insights on fast-evolving disruptive technologies in customer experience.

From cost centre to strategic priority

The traditional contact centre model was built around containment: handle volume efficiently, keep costs low, and resolve issues before they escalate. Customer satisfaction was measured, but rarely tied directly to revenue, retention or brand equity in ways that commanded board attention.

“Traditionally, the view of customer experience was that it was very much focused around inbound calls, but today, companies are touching their customers or their providers across multiple different environments; and there’s an expectation that the customer experience ties into every of those different engagement points,” Russell said. “Whether I’m interacting via a company’s website, whether I am looking at my bill, whether I am managing the logistics for a particular product that I have purchased — all of this ties in now to this concept of customer experience. It’s now so much more than just being able to take a call or take a web chat and talk to the customer.

“Today’s goal is to find how many different platforms can work together to reduce friction for customers and to increase brand loyalty. And then if you look at it from a step back, the platforms, tools and the integrations that are actually going to be able to achieve that are so much more than just those in the contact centre.”

Today, consumers are more accustomed to seamless digital experiences and are now holding every organisation they deal with to this standard. Suddenly, the quality of a customer’s experience became a direct indicator of competitive positioning.

Boards are taking notice. Industry research has shown that the majority of companies now compete primarily on customer experience.

“I think boards are recognising that the quality of interaction that their customers have is directly influencing their revenue growth,” Russell said. “It’s a lot easier now for customers to move between different platforms, and it’s much easier for organisations to deliver similar types of solutions, so boards can see that customer experience is directly influencing things like revenue growth, customer retention and operational costs.”

For Nexon’s clients, this shift has translated into a clear mandate: customer experience is no longer an operational metric. It is a strategic objective, and it requires technology investment at an enterprise scale.

AI, automation and the new experience engine

At the heart of modern customer experience transformation is the intelligent use of data, AI and automation. These aren’t abstract capabilities — they are rapidly becoming the standard for any organisation that wants to deliver personalised, responsive and proactive service. Today it’s about creating an experience that feels consistent and considered, regardless of the channel.

“In the past, chatbots were often not particularly helpful and incapable of dealing with anything but simple questions — and many customers may have felt that it actually made life harder,” Russell commented. “You hear that a lot, but I think most of the time companies are not putting that chatbot in to make your life harder; they have actually gone in with good intentions, but they didn’t necessarily know what issue they’re trying to solve.

“Nowadays, as AI capabilities have developed, we are in a better position to examine what business problems we are actually trying to solve with these capabilities.”

Automation and AI now play complementary roles. When back-office processes can be triggered automatically based on customer interactions, resolution times drop and satisfaction scores rise. More importantly, human agents are freed to focus on the interactions that genuinely require empathy, judgement and expertise.

Data is the thread that ties it all together. Organisations that can capture interaction data across every channel, synthesise it in real time, and surface relevant insights to agents and managers are operating at a fundamentally different level to those still relying on fragmented records and manual reporting.

“The biggest misconception in our industry is that AI exists to replace people,” Russell said. “It just fundamentally doesn’t: if you’re trying to build it to do that, then you’re going to end up with really cranky customers and you’re going to end up with churn to other organisations.

“The point of using AI and automation is to reduce friction for me as a consumer. So really what I need to be doing is using AI to remove unnecessary work, so my customer service agents can actually focus on higher-value conversations. If I can work out what those areas are that can be easily automated, I’m going to let AI deliver some of that decision-making. I can leverage AI to help me understand when I can just deliver a really simple self-service or to make the decision to escalate to a real live agent, while at the same time delivering the context through the entire conversation so the agent is not starting all over again.”

Connecting front and back office

One of the most persistent barriers to great customer experience is the gap between front-office engagement systems and back-office operational platforms.

“I think the problem that a lot of companies are finding is that if you don’t have that underlying infrastructure and platforms right, it’s really difficult to use any of the technologies right,” Russell explained. “And in fact, in a lot of ways, it just creates more confusion because it just spits out the same issues quicker and that doesn’t really help anybody.”

Nexon’s approach to customer experience modernisation emphasises the importance of connecting these environments.

“This year Genesys awarded us ANZ Partner of the Year for the work that we’ve done bringing that platform into large, complex organisations within Australia,” Russell said. “The best way to explain Genesys is as a CX orchestration platform: if I’ve got a platform with customer data, another a platform around support desk capability, HR systems, marketing systems — a number of different digital platforms — then platforms like Genesys position themselves as the system that can bring it all together.”

The challenge of tech debt

None of this is without complexity. Organisations modernising their customer engagement environments consistently encounter a familiar set of challenges, and legacy infrastructure remains a significant constraint.

“Many companies have a lot of tech debt, with a lot of disparate platforms, so we do a lot of work helping our customers understand what they’ve got at the moment, what they can retire, what they need to modernise,” Russell explained. “For example, we’re finding that as the cloud market matures there are many organisations spending a lot of money on subscriptions; and every one of those subscription providers are telling them that they must buy more to deliver their services — a whether it’s agentic AI or whether it’s chatbots, for example. It’s a marketing strategy as old as time itself.

“We do a lot of work helping them make sense of it all, trying to take an agnostic, business-focused approach to answer questions like: When do you use the capabilities of ServiceNow? When do you use the capabilities of Salesforce? When do you use the capabilities of Genesys to deliver integrated CX outcomes?”

The Nexon perspective

Nexon positions itself in this landscape as a trusted transformation partner — as an adviser helping organisations navigate complexity and make decisions that will serve them for the long term.

“I think we play an absolutely critical role in actually bringing integrated customer experience to life,” Russell said. “It’s been a really interesting journey to get to where we are. We don’t make the platforms, we don’t make the technology, so why are we relevant?

“It is because we have become not just an integration partner, but a transformation partner for our customers as they embark on the journey of maximising their competitive advantage though providing the best possible customer and employee experience.”

Customer experience has become an enterprise technology strategy. The organisations that recognise this — and act on it with the urgency it deserves — will be the ones that define the standard for their industries in the years ahead.

Nexon Asia Pacific

Image: David Russell, General Manager of Customer Experience – Business Development at Nexon Asia Pacific.