• Login
  • Status
  • Support
  • Partners
  • Pricing
  • Careers
  • ENLanguages
    • English
    • Deutsch
    • Français
    • 日本
    • 简体中文
    • العربية
    • 한국
    • Español
Customer Experience (CX) AI Platform
  • Customer Experience (CX) AI Platform×
  • Platform

      CXone Mpower Platform

      • Platform Overview

        Complete AI platform for customer service automation

      • Enlighten AI

        Powering smarter CX with AI-driven insights and automation.

      • Cloud Architecture

        Innovative cloud-native foundation to rapidly scale extraordinary CX

      • Voice as a Service (VaaS)

        Crystal-clear, scalable voice interactions for effortless interactions

      • Dashboards & Reporting

        Gain a full operational picture of your contact center, with enhanced visualization of real-time and historical insights

      • Integrations

        Seamlessly connect your business systems with our platform

      • Trust & Compliance

        Securing your trust with every interaction

      Discover the full value of AI in customer service

      Understand the benefits and cost savings you can achieve by embracing AI, from automation to augmentation.

      Calculate your savings

    • Products
      • Explore all Products

      • Capabilities

      • Interaction Orchestration

        Interaction Orchestration

        Orchestrate all interactions and workflows across every customer service touchpoint.

        Learn more

        • Omnichannel Routing

          Reduce wait times and boost conversions with smart customer-agent matching.

        • Proactive Engagement

          Generate more revenue, minimize hang-ups, and proactively connect to reduce friction.

        • AI Orchestrator

          Unify and optimize every customer service workflow from intent to fulfillment.

        • Agent Desktop Workspace

          Connect front and back office teams with data, conversations, and workflows together in one place.

      • Workforce Augmentation

        Workforce Augmentation

        Amplify team performance with specialized AI copilots for every role.

        Learn more

        • Specialized AI Copilots

          Elevate human performance with specialized AI copilots for every role.

        • Workforce Engagement Management

          Elevate employees, adapt to flexible work, and meet expectations - without compromise.

        • Automated Agent Notetaking

          Instantly summarize interactions - accelerating resolution times and agent efficiency.

        • Voice of the Customer

          Unlock customer insights to enhance experiences, drive loyalty, and boost business growth.

        • Interaction Analytics

          Gain AI-powered insights from 100% of interactions to drive continuous improvement.

      • Service Automation

        Service Automation

        Automated customer self-service solutions increasing retention rates.

        View Products

        • Intelligent Virtual Agent

          Boost self-service satisfaction and conversion with conversational AI agents.

        • Experience Optimization (XO)

          Synthesize real customer conversations to identify your top automation opportunities.

        • AI Agents

          Instantly create no-code AI agents powered by your data—build once, deploy everywhere.

        • Proactive AI Agent

          Keep customers engaged in conversation from onboarding to installation, service, and retention.

        • Knowledge Management

          Activate AI-powered enterprise knowledge to increase self-resolution rates and loyalty.


      • Solutions

      • By Industry

        By Industry

        • BPO

          Business Process Outsourcers

        • Financial Services

          Customer experiences that count

        • Government

          Elevate citizen trust

        • Healthcare

          Healthy patient experiences

        • Insurance

          Secure policyholder experiences

        • Retail

          Delight customers where they shop

        • Telecom

          CX for Telecommunications

        • Travel & Hospitality

          Boost traveler and guest loyalty

        Discover the full value of AI in customer service

        Understand the benefits and cost savings you can achieve by embracing AI, from automation to augmentation.

        Calculate your savings

      • By Business Initiative

        By Business Initiative

        • Grow Revenue

          Boost conversions and win rates to accelerate growth

        • Engage & Empower Employees

          Create a workplace of truly engaged employees

        • Boost Customer Loyalty

          Improve customer loyalty on interactions across the journey

        • Drive Digital Transformation

          Integrate digital technology at the center of CX

        • Small and Medium Business

          Drive growth and boost revenue with smarter, cost-effective customer service built for SMBs.

        • Call Center Software

          Empower agents to provide better experiences

        • Increase Operational Efficiency

          Leverage AI and automation to increase agent retention

        • Move to the Cloud

          Elevate experiences by moving operations to the cloud

        • Improve Compliance

          Protect your consumers with pre-built compliance solutions

        • Proactive Customer Engagement

          Elevate customer satisfaction with proactive conversational AI

      • Integrations & Custom Solutions

        Integrations & Custom Solutions

        • CXexchange Marketplace

          Discover partner solutions to extend capabilities on our platform

        • Pre-Built Integrations

          Seamlessly connect your business systems with our platform

        • Developer Tools & APIs

          Endless customization options with RESTful APIs and robust SDKs

        • Partner Ecosystem

          Embark on a journey of shared success and collaboration

        91% of customers recommend NiCE as a preferred CCaaS vendor

        Gartner® named NiCE the only Customers’ Choice CCaaS vendor in its 2024 Peer Insights™ “Voice of the Customer for Contact Center as a Service” report.

        Get report


      • View All Products
    • Services
      • Explore all Services

      Professional Services

      • Professional Services

        Industry-leading expertise, tools and know-how

      • Implementation Partners

        NICE-certified implementation partners

      • Business Consulting

        Your partner for successful transformation

      Training

      • Contact Center Training

        Tailored education delivered by CX experts

      Support & Assistance

      • Customer Support

        Global support you can depend on

      Make the smartest buying decision with the latest Gartner analysis

      NiCE has been named a Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Leader for Contact Center as a Service for the 10th consecutive year and is positioned furthest on Completeness of Vision.

      Get report

    • Resources

        Knowledge Base

        • All Resources

          Whitepapers, datasheets, demos and more

        • Analyst Perspectives

          Contact center reports from third party analysis

        • Terms Glossary

          Detailed descriptions of industry-related terms

        • FAQs

          Contact center focused frequently asked questions

        • Guides

          Expert insights for superior CX

        Learning & Insights

        • On-Demand Webinars

          Browse our extensive webinar catalog

        • Interactive Product Tours

          Explore the complete platform with our self-guided demos

        • Blog

          CX industry guidance by contact center experts

        • Why NiCE? Video Series

          Step Inside The Room Where It Happened to see CX AI in action

        • NiCE & Simple: Video Demo Series

          Brilliant, bite-sized videos from our top product pros

        Community

        • Events

          Upcoming events and webinars

        • Customer Stories

          Our customer's success is paramount. Read case studies about real CX transformation

        • NiCE Clubs

          Collaborate, learn, and share best practices for customer service excellence

        Discover the full value of AI in customer service

        Understand the benefits and cost savings you can achieve by embracing AI, from automation to augmentation.

        Calculate your savings

      • Company

          Company

          • About Us

            Powering seamless cloud experiences

          • Investors

            Investors relations, reports and filings

          • Global Offices

            Interactive map of locations worldwide

          • Careers

            View job openings and learn about our culture

          • NiCE Leadership

            Meet our global leadership and executive team

          News & Media

          • Events

            Upcoming events and webinars

          • Press Releases

            Find the latest updates from NiCE

          • Media Center

            Media contacts and resources

          Corporate Governance

          • NiCE Trust Center

            Securing your trust with every interaction

          • Market Leadership

            Discover why NiCE is the market leader

          • Corporate Responsibility

            In a world where you can be anything, be NiCE

          Make the smartest buying decision with the latest Gartner analysis

          NiCE has been named a Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Leader for Contact Center as a Service for the 10th consecutive year and is positioned furthest on Completeness of Vision.

          Get report

          • ENLanguages
            • English
            • Deutsch
            • Français
            • 日本
            • 简体中文
            • العربية
            • 한국
            • Español
          • Get Started
            • Login
            • Status
            • Support
            • Partners
            • Pricing
            • Careers

          Company

          • About Us
          • Careers
          • Global Leadership
          • Media Center
          • Investors
          • Awards
          • Global Office Locations
          • Contact Us
          • CCaaS
          • Customer Experience
          • NiCE Public Safety
          • NiCE Actimize
          • NiCE RPA

          Partners

          • NiCE Partners Overview
          • Developer Partners (DEVone)
          • CXone Mpower Partner Portal
          • NiCE Help Partner Portal
          • NiCE User Group

          Customer Support

          • Customer Support Overview
          • CXone Mpower Support Login
          • NiCE Customer Support
          © 2025 NiCE
          • Terms of Use
          • Site Map
          • Privacy Policy
          • Legal
          • Cookies Settings
          • Accessibility

          Stay Connected

          © 2025 NiCE
          How to Design an Omnichannel CX Program That Beats the 67% Failure Rate

          How to Design an Omnichannel CX Program That Beats the 67% Failure Rate

          by Mallory Mast
          September 28, 2020
          Share

          Ask the tanned, swimsuit-clad person in the “after” photo how they did it. Their six-pack most certainly didn’t come from a gimmick to lose 15-pounds in seven days. At least, not without spending a fortune. There’s an insatiable appetite for “lose weight quickly without effort” ploys. Yet, there’s no secret to getting in shape; doing so requires a transformational shift in lifestyle and diet.

          evolving customer’s growing expectations

          In Customer Experience, leaders often face their own swimsuit-season constraint dilemma: Meet the evolving customer’s growing expectations faster without spending additional budget. But, there’s no “faster, easier, cheaper, better” secret to an omnichannel customer service program. Great omnichannel CX offers connected channel hopping to any of the customer’s preferred channels and integrates into a unified experience where agents can support all channels. Great omnichannel CX most often requires a transformational shift, which is why customers come to us to help solve disparate and unscalable Frankenstein CX programs that are costly and haven’t returned the results they were seeking.

          Many companies struggle with this dilemma. In fact, customer-centric thought leader Bob Thompson’s research indicates only 1/3 of CX initiatives are successful[1]—nearly a 70% failure rate. This guide was made to help you beat the odds. Follow these five steps to ensure your after photo of an Omnichannel Customer Experience program is the kind of CX people tape to their refrigerators for inspiration.

          What is a digital omnichannel experience?

          When Omnichannel CX first became buzzworthy, omnichannel meaning was: a seamless cross-channel experience for the customer. In terms of digital customer experience channels, it primarily included chat and email. But the Next Generation of digital channels span far wider, encompassing a channel-blending experience across SMS, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and whatever the hottest new social channel of tomorrow might be.

          Keeping up with such a rapidly changing digital world means designing CX for omnichannel isn’t always enough. To address today’s customer experience obstacles and future-proof them for tomorrow, it’s important to distinguish and plan for what’s known as “digital-first omnichannel.”

          • Multichannel – In multichannel contact centers the customer receives support in more than one channel that have little to no interaction between them.
          • Omnichannel – The customer receives support in any channel with a seamless experience from channel to channel. Voice is prioritized and digital channels are mostly limited to first-generation (chat and email), where some agents might specialize in digital channels.
          • Digital-first Omnichannel – The customer receives support in any channel with a seamless experience from channel to channel. Digital Omnichannel CX prioritizes a much broader spectrum of next generation digital channels (email, chat, messaging, mobile apps, social monitoring) where all agents are digitally fluent. 
          First generation arch


          Digital Omnichannel
           
          accounts for many barriers in implementing omnichannel customer experiences. Instead of focusing on the customer’s experience throughout channels including digital, digital-first omnichannel prioritizes customer experience in digital channels and unifies the experience for customers and agents. Digital-first omnichannel addresses administration barriers, multiple agent streams and interfaces, complex implementation and time-consuming management and future proofs CX in ways traditional Omnichannel doesn’t always support.

          Step 1: Know Your Customers’ Expectations

          Channel popularity by age group

          To get it right, you need to answer these three questions:

          • Who are your customers?
          • What are their preferred channels?
          • What do your customers expect?

          To answer these questions, develop customer personas, a representative profile of each of your customer segments. Each persona should be grounded in research and data including demographic, geographic and psychographic information, such as: their goals, motivation, preferences and pain points.

          Your marketing team might already have personas developed, on which you can piggy-back or flush-out with your own team’s insight. In addition to internal primary data, you can also use secondary industry data to supplement, such as data like the “Channels popularity by age group” micrographic or any other CX demographic research found in the NiCE CXone Customer Experience (CX) Transformation Benchmark.

          Step 2: Map the Customer Journey

          What motivates a customer to message your customer support? This support interaction might be the fourth or fifth interaction the customer has had with your company, and chances are their sentiment at this interaction doesn’t start positive. Accordingly, the full customer experience doesn’t just include the first interaction with an agent. To understand how you support your customers’ needs at onset through resolution, it’s helpful to work through a customer journey mapping exercise.

          Map the Customer Journey

          A customer journey map is a visual diagram of your customer’s interactions with your business representing all touchpoints across all channels. A customer journey map most typically includes:

          • Stages – The milestones of a customer journey from when your company first becomes visible, through purchase and post-customer stages.
          • Touchpoints – All human and non-human interactions a customer makes or takes with your company (Performs a search, visits website, signs up for demo, sales qualification call, help and support, checkout, return, etc.).
          • Channels – Where each interaction takes place and the transferring between channels (live agent, Facebook messaging, email, call, website chat, etc.).
          • Motivations – What goals the customer is trying to accomplish at each touchpoint and throughout the journey.
          • Sentiment – How a customer feels or level of satisfaction at each stage of the interaction. Use your customer satisfaction performance metrics to ensure accuracy.

          A visual representation of the accurate journey will help you understand where there might be customer friction or opportunities for improvement in your optimization, process or design of a digital-first omnichannel customer experience. If your customer journey varies based on the customer persona, you might consider creating a map per persona.

          It’s important to create the realistic journey of omnichannel customer care your customers experience, which means you’ll need to remove your assumptions and biases. And although a good starting place might be from your perception of the journey, you need to use all available data and insights to confirm or disprove your assumptions. Customer experience metrics — like Net Promoter Score (NPS), First Call Resolution, abandon rate and reason, Average Handling Rate (AHR), Quality of Call, etc. — are great metrics to support the customer journey.

          If you feel there are blind spots in your knowledge, read this quick and comprehensive guide to Uncovering Your Customer Experience Blind Spots or consider conducting Customer Satisfaction Surveys where you might not have information at hand.

          The more interactions and touchpoints your company offers, the more complicated and less linear this mapping can become. Even how to structure it visually can be a challenging and time-consuming exercise. However, this is an effective means to accurately understanding and solving for customer experience. Fortunately, your marketing team might already have a journey mapped. But if they don’t, there’s many customer journey map templates and resources you can find online, such as this LinkedIn Learning course.

          Step 3: Evaluate The Agent Experience

          If agents lose time switching between many screens and customer information isn’t connected an already frustrated customer must repeat themselves. It’s a powerless situation for the agent and customer alike, resulting in avoidable decreased KPIs. Digital omnichannel isn’t just about ensuring the customer’s experience is unified. A crucial component to digital-first omnichannel cx that many contact center leaders overlook is the agent experience, even though:

          86% of CX executives rank agent experience (AX) as the No.1 driver of better CX[2]

          challenges of working in customer service

          The biggest challenges agents face in delivering CX are solved by a digital-first omnichannel CX program, where agents have training, processes and tools to succeed at delivering great CX.

          The ICMI Agent Experience Maturity Model and Toolkit is a framework that includes a handy scoring template to help you assess your agent experience.

          Where many companies can see failure is in neglecting agent activation of a program. In any shift in process, there’s the potential for resistance. To mitigate agent resistance, incorporate agents into the acceptance and buy-in process. Make your agents feel ownership of impact by surveying them about their experience and incorporating it into your vision, get their input on a draft of the plan and take time to introduce them fully before training. Also consider incorporating follow-up surveying on how the onboarding, training and rollout is going to cover any gaps or opportunities in your go live.

          Here are other resources, tips and strategies to improve agent experience:

          • Improving Your Agent Experience, One Step at a Time webinar recording covers the process of building agent experience maturity to improve CX.
          • The New Thinking Behind Great Contact Centre Leadership webinar recording covers tools and techniques to help you engage agents.
          • To see more agent experience statistics and learn more about what motivates and engage agents, download ICMI’s research findings: “The State of Agent Experience and Engagement in Today’s Contact Center.”

          Step 4: SWOT Analysis to Develop Your CX Vision

          Once you do the legwork to determine your customer expectations, journey and agent experience, you’re ready to design your vision.

          To prioritize, it might be helpful to summarize your findings in a quick SWOT analysis:

          SWOT Analysis
          • Strengths – What are you getting right? These are what you can maintain, build or leverage in your action plan.
          • Weaknesses – What are you getting wrong today? Your action plan should include how to remedy these.
          • Opportunities – What could you do to get more out of your CX? Your action plan can optimize for these.
          • Threats – What are potential obstacles for the future? Your action plan should cover how you’ll counter these.

          Your action plan should address:

          • Channel requirements – Including what you need today, what you could need in the future and what happens when you need to add channels.
          • Technology integration - How you’ll unify these channels for the customer and agents (e.g. automatic routing to the right agent in the customer’s preferred channel, a unified interface for agents and visibility to all customer data).
          • Implementation - How you’ll onboard the program operationally, including: agent activation, internal agent and manager hiring, agent and manager training and agent engagement tactics.
          • KPIs you’ll use to measure omnichannel success, how you’ll measure them and a plan for continuous improvement.

          To help you determine the most efficient and cost-effective solution, scope the cost and time for all options:

          • The cost of inaction or maintaining your status quo
          • The cost and time to upgrade or optimize your existing solution. Be sure to include any contingencies or considerations you uncover, such as tool limitations, and try to put these in monetary terms.
          • The cost and time of implementing a new solution. Be sure to include any contingencies or considerations you uncover.

          In this exercise, it might be beneficial to setup an exploratory demo or request a quote from other omnichannel contact center solutions. You can learn more about NiCE’s digital-first omnichannel solution in the video below. If you want to learn more, you can view a longer 20-minute demo of all our offerings or request a quote. 

           

          Step 5: Align on a Business Case for Omnichannel Customer Experience

          In any given customer journey, a customer might interact with marketing content or tactics, a sales person and a support agent. Accordingly, a transformation to digital-first omnichannel CX also requires support from all involved departments.

          Whether it’s finance and operations, customer service, marketing or sales, each department that plays a role should be brought-in and bought-in as a collaborative stakeholder. Without stakeholder alignment and consensus, your implementation can fall flat. Outside of formalizing your plan for CX, build a business case to create urgency for the resources and support you need.

          A business case for digital omnichannel CX should include:

          To successfully gain consensus and alignment within your organization, use these tips:

          • Draft a business case to convince collaborators by answering “What’s in it for me?” for each involved, and don’t forget to show the penalty or cost for non-change.
          • Set realistic and clear expectations on how each collaborator will be involved, what costs are associated and the timeline you anticipate.
          • Gain stakeholder input, feedback and considerations on the vision and incorporate all considerations. Rinse and repeat until you have a final plan with consensus and approval from all stakeholders

          Travel service company GANT Travel successfully made the business case for its cloud contact center and provides other great tips in this 2-minute video:   

          Here are some other helpful resources and guidance on building a business case:

          • The Innovator’s Guide to the Digital-first Contact Center includes market data to help prove and justify the investment.
          • To better understand the cost-benefit of a Digital-first Contact Center watch this webinar replay.
          • For general guidance, watch this helpful on-demand webinar recording on building a contact center business case.
          • For help formatting your business case, review the DMG Consulting paper on Building a Business Case for Cloud-Based Contact Center Solutions.
          • This comprehensive ICMI Omnichannel Contact Center Toolkit includes support calculating the benefits, can help inform which channels you should incorporate and educate on measuring omnichannel success.
          • If you currently use or are considering NiCE CXone as an omnichannel solution, the Total Economic Impact (TEI) model for NiCE CXone can help you calculate the financial ROI.

          Why getting omnichannel customer experience right matters

          91 percent of customers choose a seamless experience

          Digital omnichannel is the future and a ripe opportunity to differentiate your offering against your competitors:

          • 91% of consumers expect a seamless experience[1]
          • Only 24% of businesses give themselves an excellent rating on their ability to support seamless channel swapping[1]

          But, many brands can’t or haven’t been able to deliver on a true digital-first omnichannel experience. For some, the barriers like resource strain, technology, cultural shift, tools, complex integration and high-cost force settling with “good enough.” For others who attempted and failed probably went with a “quicker-cheaper-easier-faster” attempt, resulting in a fragmented and costly channel Frankenstein experience. To get it right, brands must plan for transformation.

          The choice is yours: Which “After” photo of Omnichannel CX represents you?

          Frankenstein
          Digital-Omnichannel First

           

           If you found this guide helpful and want learn more about addressing the next generation of digital channels including market data to help you build the case, download The Digital-first contact center: The Innovator’s Guide and don’t forget to forward it to your colleagues to start greasing their wheels.


          [1] https://customerthink.com/an-inconvenient-truth-93-of-customer-experience-initiatives-are-failing/

          [2] 2019 ICMI State of Agent Experience and Engagement Survey

          About the Author

          Mallory Mast

          Mallory Mast supports the marketing team at NiCE CXone with a decade of experience creating content and content strategies for startup and global cloud technology brands. Since joining NiCE CXone in 2018, she has worked closely with front-line sales to shape content strategies that support customers and prospects. Mallory is a Chicago-based, award-winning food and entertainment journalist that spends her weekends restoring a 115-year old craftsman home with her husband and is a proud mom of two rescue mutts, Cash and June.

          See All Blogs

          Follow Us

          Follow us to get the latest news from your preferred Social Network

          linkedinlinkedinlinkedinlinkedin

          Popular Posts

          5 reasons why AI without memory is just guesswork

          July 2, 2025

          AI that forgets isn’t worth paying for: 5 reasons memory is key to AI-powered experiences

          Read

          July 1, 2025

          Create a streamlined world: Where tickets and data live in one place

          Read
          The power of partnership: How NiCE, AWS, ServiceNow, and Snowflake are creating a NiCE world

          June 24, 2025

          The power of partnership: How NiCE, AWS, ServiceNow, and Snowflake are creating a NiCE world

          Read

          June 18, 2025

          Reimagine automation with CXone Mpower Agents that act, resolve, and scale instantly

          Read

          June 17, 2025

          Building a NiCE world: The stories making the world brighter

          Read

          More from the blog

          5 reasons why AI without memory is just guesswork
          AI

          AI that forgets isn’t worth paying for: 5 reasons memory is key to AI-powered experiences

          Think about the last time a business truly impressed you. Not with flashy tech or a clever ad, but with the simple power of remembering who you are.

          July 2, 2025

          Customer Experience

          Create a streamlined world: Where tickets and data live in one place

          What if service wasn’t something customers had to chase… but something that found them? What if technology didn’t replace people… but actually amplified their ability to serve? What if we could finally blur the lines between the front office and back office… making the entire customer journey seamless?

          July 1, 2025

          The power of partnership: How NiCE, AWS, ServiceNow, and Snowflake are creating a NiCE world
          AI

          The power of partnership: How NiCE, AWS, ServiceNow, and Snowflake are creating a NiCE world

          At NiCE, our vision is to create a world where customer service just works. It’s a world that is seamless, smart, and connected across every interaction.

          June 24, 2025

        • The business problem (opportunity/challenge)
        • Description of what’s needed to solve for the business problem
        • Quantification of the benefits
        • Financial analysis to justify the cost of the investment