Despite rapid advancements, many consumers still feel that the technology powering their customer service experience is falling short. Some savvy consumers know what level of customer service that technology is capable of delivering, and their expectations have risen accordingly. For both segments, this leaves CX professionals with an opportunity to rethink and consolidate their approach.

To meet growing customer demands, CX professionals like you rely on a variety of tools that make up your customer service technology stack - the combination of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, ticketing systems, customer support chat, phone or voice support solutions, new AI technology, plus industry specific tools.

Each of these tools plays an essential role in delivering customer support, and there are many software options available that come with their own unique strengths. CX leaders often get their teams up and running with a stack of tools that meet their initial needs. But over time, managing multiple platforms can lead to inefficiencies, increased costs, and operational complexity.

Consolidating vendors has been a recent focus for many organizations. CIO Magazine asked senior IT executives and found that at the end of 2023, 95% were planning to consolidate vendors within the next 12 months, with 80% reporting the motivation was systems architecture and 69% reporting it would cut costs.

As your business grows, consolidating your stack can help you scale. It can streamline operations, reduce costs, and improve the overall customer experience—leading to better business outcomes and keeping up with consumer demands.

In this guide, we’ll discuss why and how you can consolidate your tech stack.

Overcoming the Frankenstack

Does this sound familiar? Over time, you’ve assembled a stack of CX tools, a CRM here, a ticketing system there, chat for instant support, phone for complex problems, and AI for efficiency. Plus, you likely have some industry specific tools that you rely on as well, like appointment scheduling or returns management.

Each tool had its purpose, but now your team is juggling a “Frankenstack” that’s complex and costly. Agents are bouncing between platforms, slowing down service and fragmenting the customer experience. These tools are usually designed to work together with the goal of enabling you to deliver seamless customer service, but in practice, it’s not always smooth.

That’s where consolidation comes in. Consolidating to a unified platform can change this. It reduces costs, simplifies operations, and lets agents focus on what matters—delivering seamless support.

Let’s dive into how brands have streamlined their stacks to scale smarter:

Terra Kaffe

Terra Kaffe found that their support agents toggled between several tabs open to get the information needed to serve customers. They consolidated much of their CX stack with Kustomer using our Timeline feature. This saved agents time, which allowed them to maintain consistent high CSAT scores even as their customer numbers quadrupled.

Vuori

Vuori beta tested Kustomer’s new AI Agents and quickly saw stellar results. Chad Warren, Senior Manager of Customer Service, shares, “So far, 40% of all conversations coming into chat are fully automated using Kustomer's AI Agents. This frees up our human agents to focus on more personalized interactions and complex issues."

Kin Insurance

Kin Insurance was using a combination of custom-made tools and CX software. It consolidated its CX tech stack with Kustomer to address multiple business needs. One of the primary benefits was reducing response times to customers. Another key benefit was that Kustomer delivered real-time insights to their business intelligence team - without needing engineering resources. Learn more here.

The Real Impact of a Unified CX Tech Stack

Taking the time to shake up the tech you use to run your business can pay off big time. Here are some of the specific reasons you should consider streamlining your stack.

Save up to 30% per contact

One of the primary benefits to consolidating any sort of tech tools is reducing costs. Like in the insurance industry, when you bundle, you can save. When you eliminate redundant tools, you can remove a line item from the budget because you don’t need to maintain separate software subscriptions. This also brings about lower IT maintenance costs; fewer systems can mean less time and budget spent on IT support, updates, and troubleshooting problems with more systems, or issues with integrations.

This can bring about meaningful savings by not needing three to five vendors to achieve the same outcome as one. For customers who switched from Zendesk to Kustomer, we found they had an average savings of 30% per contact.

Especially as more companies implement AI
add-ons, they may charge more for those tools. You may find your renewal price jumps a lot - then multiply that across however many vendors you’re using.

If the tools in your tech stack use seat-based pricing rather than usage-based, you may also be spending money on unused seats that you needed at one point to handle seasonal fluctuations in customer needs.

Save up to 9% of time from task-switching

How many times per day do you think that your customer service agents toggle between apps and websites to do their jobs? Harvard Business Review reported that the average knowledge worker toggled about 1,200 times per day, which accumulated to spending about 9% of their time at work reorienting themselves after toggling.

Consolidating your tech stack and reducing the number of tools to toggle between can save your team hours per week. If your team has high collaboration needs between agents and other departments internally, using a consolidated tool with something like Tasks in Kustomer can especially help save time from tool-switching.

This can allow them to respond to new customer inquiries faster, speed up resolution times, and ultimately improve customer satisfaction scores.

It can also help your support agents continue to deliver high quality support as your business grows. Plus, when more tools are in one system, data syncs faster - meaning you can get insights that you need to make business decisions more quickly.

Deliver better service

Consolidating your CX stack can provide your agents with a holistic view of each customer interaction. When they can see all of a customer’s history and communication in one place, support agents can deliver better customer service because they can respond more accurately and avoid duplicate efforts. If you’re using an omnichannel support platform, agents can communicate on the channels a customer prefers.

Maximize the power of AI

When you integrate AI into your CX tech stack, that opens up even more possibilities for improved customer service quality. As we covered before, most software tools are adding AI. With a multi-part tech stack, you could have multiple types of AI in your stack. They might not work well together, or will require more of your staff’s time to manage integrations.

AI Agents work best when AI is integrated smoothly with your tech stack. Just like with human agents, a consolidated system can allow the AI to work faster and more accurately by accessing all the required systems and information in one place. Going with a consolidated system could help you take advantage of AI more fully.

Get clearer performance data

Clear data is essential to truly understand how various aspects of your business are performing. Consolidating your CX can help improve your data hygiene because the data is centralized from various touchpoints in fewer systems. You don’t have to try to port data from multiple tools into one system, then handle organizing it, de-duplicating and cleansing it (or having redundant data which can increase security vulnerabilities and eat up storage costs).

43% of SMB CMOs reported that their teams spend more time getting data in one place than actually making use of data insights. Centralized data from various touchpoints results in more accurate insights, reporting, and business intelligence, helping you strategize initiatives that will compound further benefits for your business.

Scale the business more easily

When your business is small, using simpler or inexpensive tools can help you get off the ground, but your team can outgrow them. Or, perhaps your organization took the “best in breed” approach and opted to use multiple platforms that each do a single thing really well.

But over time, especially as customer interactions increase, a unified system is much more efficient at managing all channels—CRM, ticketing, chat, phone, and AI. When new features come out for the CX tools you have in your stack, it’s faster to implement them on a consolidated stack because you won’t need to worry about re-configuring integrations or other workflows, and you’ll see improvements faster.

How to Approach Consolidation

Ready to get going on consolidation? A migration can be a big project for your team, but don’t let it hold you back from using the best tool for your business. Here’s a five-step process on how you can approach consolidating your CX tech stack.

For this process, it’s important to bring in your front line support agents and operations team members at the beginning. These people that use the tech stack each day and handle integrations and maintaining the technical aspects will have rich insights about the system that can help you make the best decisions.

Forbes reports that only 36% of data migration projects come in at the forecasted budget and only 46% come in on time. Making time and space to hear from all the relevant stakeholders can help you understand the proper scope and considerations before the project is underway, saving you time and money.

1)
Assess your current tech stack

To start, you’ll need to know deeply what you’re currently working with. Thoroughly audit all tools currently in use, including CRM, ticketing, chat, phone/voice, and AI tools. The first goal is to understand quantitative aspects. In your audit, make sure you:

• Understand all of the existing features, available integrations, and capabilities of each tool.
  

• Identify gaps or overlaps in functionality.

• Understand the usage and adoption rates of specific features.

• Map out the integrations currently in use and any not in use.

• Record all automations in the workflow.

• Calculate the costs associated, and whether you’re billed for a seat-based model, usage-based model, or a bit of both.

Your audit will help you identify redundancies, inefficiencies, siloes, and integration gaps that may slow down your workflow or cause you to spend more money than you need.

2) Gather feedback

After you’re set on quantitative aspects of your stack, move to qualitative aspects by gathering feedback from your team. Survey your agents who interact with these tools daily to understand what they like, their pain points using the existing system, and desired features.

Consider what your operations team members need from the CX tech stack to support their tasks, like reporting and optimizing. Ask how your current stack compares to tools employees have used in the past. Be sure to tap your network of peer leaders or former colleagues as well.

3) Evaluate alternatives

Next, consider what alternative tools are out there. Research all-in-one customer service platforms that consolidate these tools into a single solution. Look for systems that offer seamless integration, unified customer data, and omnichannel capabilities.

Kustomer is a clear winner in this regard. Our clients appreciate our comprehensive tool that is still customizable to their needs, allowing them to deliver high quality service on whichever channel their customers reach out. Plus, our usage-based pricing aligns with the flexibility CX leaders told us they want and need.

4) Ensure smooth migration

Once you commit to consolidating your CX tech stack and moving forward with a comprehensive solution, it’s time to migrate.

Plan ahead: a detailed migration plan will help the project go more smoothly. Outline the specific steps for transferring data, such as importing customer records, service history, and communication logs. Define clear timelines for each phase of the migration whether it’s data export, system configuration, or integration of industry specific tools.

Consider phasing the implementation work by department or region to minimize disruptions. Ensure backups are in place to prevent data loss, and have a contingency plan for any unexpected issues. Be sure to account for enough time to complete the migration and any integrations with other tools that support your business.

You can also work with the service provider on the best way to migrate to the new system. Make use of their self-service resources and any onboarding or training services provided.

5) Train Your Team

To pull off the consolidation, you’ll want to get your team up and running with it successfully. Clear communication is key. Call out the features in the new solution that align with the feedback that you collected from your agents and operations team to get their buy-in. If you can get your teams excited about not just transitioning but truly making the most of the tool, you’ll have a smoother onboarding experience.

Provide comprehensive, hands-on training sessions that cover all platform features, ensuring your agents understand how to navigate the system efficiently. Leaders can also create quick reference guides, encourage ongoing learning, and offer support during the transition. Leverage any of the self-service and training resources from the platform.

Conclusion

Your CX tech stack likely consists of a CRM, ticketing solution, phone tool, chat, AI, and speciality integration tools. If you’re using individual vendors for these tools, you’re likely spending more on a less efficient system.

You should consider consolidating your tech stack because it can:

• Save money

• Save time

• Improve your brand’s customer service

• Maximize the power of AI

• Provide clearer data

• Facilitate scaling the business

Consolidation and migration is a big project, and preparation is key to pull it off smoothly. Here are some key tips to remember:

• Audit your current tech and what users need and want from an improved one

• Work with your team to gather feedback from stakeholders at all levels

• Evaluate your options for CX tools

• Plan your migration project ahead of time

• Train the team on the new stack
  
  

Customers know what sort of service quality that brands can deliver with great tech, and they’re holding you to a high standard. Evaluate your current systems and explore consolidation opportunities to help your brand stay competitive.

Ready to see how Kustomer can help your CX team deliver top-tier service and streamline your business operations? Schedule a demo.