After decades of continuous enhancement of customer experience (CX) strategies and billions invested in CX-Outsourcing BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) firms, not to mention additional investments in recruiting and training processes, further spending to improve the employee experience (EX), and of course the onslaught of AI-infused technology solutions to complement every step of the customer and employee journeys, somehow CX continues to get worse.
According to Forrester’s 2025 Customer Experience Index1, CX quality dropped to an all-time low for North American brands, marking four consecutive years of decline. In fact, only 7% of the 469 brands from the feedback Forrester’s gathered from over 275,000 consumers improved their CX.
And it’s having a significant impact to those brands that are not improving. According to research by Genesys, a global leader in cloud-based contact center and unified communications solutions, over 50% of customers will switch brands after as little as two poor interactions.2
But it may be the opportunity cost that’s even higher. According to research by Forrester’s, improving CX alone can give companies a 1.5X lift in revenue – a huge miss if your contact center is not driving improvement in CX.
It’s worth also considering for a moment the Brand Experience (BX) – the perception of your brand by prospective customers – which when improved on its own has a 1.6X revenue lift.3
But the real magic happens when you combine improved CX and BX together – to create something Forrester’s has called “Total Experience Score” – that when you improve both the brand and the customer experience simultaneously – the revenue lift is 3.5X-4.1X.
So, what’s the trick to simultaneously combining CX and BX?
Alignment across teams.
Why CX is Failing in 2025
Anyone who has held any type of leadership position in any organization in any industry knows that creating team alignment is the biggest challenge facing the business.
Always has been, always will be.
Alignment is hard within a single team of 6 people. Which only makes it harder when you need alignment of teams across every step of the customer journey – from pre-purchase branding awareness right through to post-purchase support.
This is not meant as a knock on CX-outsourcing, or the BPO industry in any way. I’m personally a product of the industry. After spending 30+ years in BPOs – growing, leading and creating alignment across teams of thousands of employees throughout North America, Lat-Am/Caribbean and South-East Asia – I know full well the benefits of outsourcing.
When a brand sets clear expectations, effectively measures their data, implements the right technology, optimizes incentives and partners with the right BPO, it’s been proven time and again that CX results can be stronger at a lower cost through outsourcing than within internally run contact centers.
But the times they are a-changin’.
The Case for In-Sourcing – Total Experience Starts with Alignment
To truly create an aligned experience across brand experience and customer experience, having CX teams that can interact directly with your marketing and sales teams without silos and filters may be the game changer for companies that want to grow and improve their ‘Total Experience’.
Even more so important when your company is considering implementing new AI-enabled or AI-autonomous technologies and processes to take advantage of the massive cost-savings and revenue opportunities presented by these cutting-edge innovations.
Adopting new tools and tech has never been easy.
Any time an organization implements a new technology solution, their entire investment can be wasted if not executed properly. If leadership isn’t invested in listening to their front-line and talking about “what’s in it for them” while rolling out new tech, it’s usually doomed from the start. And AI tools haven’t made that part of it any easier. According to the Wall Street Journal, companies that miss getting employee buy-in during AI-implementations typically achieve less than 5% in performance gains.4
And the best way to get employee feedback and buy-in across marketing, sales and CX teams? Having direct access to get feedback from those employees and ensure they are a direct part of implementing the solution.
An additional major consideration for 2025 is the opportunity to shift your CX contact-centers from being a ‘cost-center’ to a source of revenue generation, an opportunity to improve overall customer LTV (life-time value).
Most contact centers today still operate as cost-centers, using self-service and AI-tools as cost-saving gears to deflect calls away from human agents. However, a growing number of forward-thinking companies are shifting this perspective and using EVERY customer contact as an opportunity to increase value and uncover new value-add revenue opportunities through improved employee training and AI-assist tools to unlock the ‘next-best action’ recommendation for customers.
To maximize the impact of this shift, it makes sense for this transition to occur inside the company – where the alignment of teams across all channels and all stages of the customer journey will be strongest.
Ok – so what if you did decide that ‘in-sourcing’ your CX contact center is the right solution for your company? What’s next?
Rebuilding the Contact Centre
Today’s contact center is a complex mix of integrated PEOPLE and TECHNOLOGY processes. In an organization that runs an effective contact center you’ll potentially find behind every ‘Contact Us’ button:
- Recruiting, Sourcing, and Applicant Tracking Systems to hire the right people.
- Virtual Classrooms & Learning Management Systems (LMS) to onboard effectively and speed up your team’s time to proficiency.
- Omnichannel Routing & Distribution Systems to deliver the right conversation from the right channel to the right agent – human or AI.
- CRM Platforms for a unified customer view and to track every interaction.
- Workforce Management (WFM) Tools for forecasting and scheduling.
- AI-Enabled Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) that organize customer support processes and provide consistent answers across channels for every step of the customer support journey.
- AI-Powered Autonomous Agents & AI Human-Agent Assist Tools to align support, provide ideal next best action recommendation and give real-time customer sentiment analysis whether the interaction is happening with human or autonomous AI-agents
- Interaction Analytics to capture and analyze the Voice of the Customer (VoC) with sentiment review and automate quality assurance (QA).
- Advanced Survey Tools to create customer engagement and capture direct-from-consumer feedback
- Business Intelligence Dashboards to unify performance data for all of your key performance indicators and assist your leadership team to make informed decisions.
- Performance Management, Coaching and Gamification Systems to drive continuous improvement and employee excellence.
- Security & Compliance Tools to safeguard customer trust and keep your company protected from regulators
Step one for any successful rebuild of an internal CX center is going to be taking stock of your current processes, technology stack and spend and determine if it’s optimized for your organization’s scale and capable of creating the alignment across the ideal customer experience for your brand.
Not every organization necessarily needs to automate each of these components – it starts by getting the process defined to match the needs of your business and your customers. Finding the right mix for your business is what needs to happen. This means mapping your customers’ ideal experience from beginning to end.
Mapping the Customer Journey: Your Alignment Blueprint
Creating a complete Journey Map for your organization is not an exercise for the faint of heart, but is a worthy investment if you want to truly optimize your overall Customer Experience (CX) and combine it with an opportunity to improve your Brand Experience (BX) to create the ‘Total Experience’.
Book a full day. Maybe more depending on the size and scale of your organization. Have a white board. Plenty of sticky notes. Be prepared to buy lunch. Designate a facilitator. Invite the leaders of Marketing, Sales, Product/Service fulfillment (Operations), CX, HR, IT and Finance.
I’d recommend having your brand’s Vision, Mission and Values somewhere noticeably visible in the room for all to reference and reflect upon.
Then create a map of EVERY potential customer touchpoint – from prospect awareness to lead, sale, support – all the way through to cancelled customer – and hopefully winning them back. For each touchpoint, in the right order, capture:
- What the touchpoint is and for which customer type
- Why this touchpoint exists & what triggers it
- What happens including the channel (phone/web/chat, etc)
- How long it should take
- Who (what role) handles it
- The tools/systems/technology used (and how much they cost)
- The ideal expected outcome and how you’ll measure success
Once the map is completed, documented and reviewed, you’ll probably have already identified alignment issues or even duplicated steps that need to be corrected with improved processes or technology.
Take a picture of the map, then make a digital copy. Share it with the same team. Give the team at least a week to review, provide feedback and identify potential alignment gaps and opportunities to improve customer value.
At this point, it should be clear where the ownership of each touchpoint respectively belongs to Marketing, Sales, Ops and CX including the handoffs and interdependencies between teams.
The CX Team Deep-Dive Review
Now it’s time for the CX leader (as well as your leaders for Marketing, Sale and Ops) to take full ownership of their touchpoints. For every touchpoint CX owns, review and confirm:
- Are we doing this consistently today?
- Do we have documented standard operating procedures (SOPS)
- Is it measured?
- Do we know the pain points?
- Are the current technology/tools/systems working well?
- What can be removed, automated or improved?
If your current environment is 100% dependent on BPO partners, extend the deep dive to them. Visit your BPO centers. Do skip-level meetings with the front-line supervisors and separately with agents to ensure you get real answers to the above questions.
Whatever you do, validate the feedback from your internal teams and your BPO partners with the true test of CX – review your customer surveys, inspect your current speech conversation analytics, LISTEN to actual calls and READ transcripts.
Don’t rely on hearsay, validate.
Reimagining the People Plan: CX Hiring to Coaching to Success
Next, if your plan is to move forward with In-Sourcing your contact center, your CX leadership needs to confirm the roles and responsibilities of the people needed to complete these steps of the journey and how to ensure the right people are in place:
- Environment – should we do this onsite, work-from-home or hybrid?
- Recruiting – how do we ensure we hire the right people. What’s the ideal way to Source, Screen and Select people that are going to be aligned with creating the CX we need for our business with the right tech?
- Training – how do we ensure we complete training effectively and efficiently to ensure we have a team that’s aligned, yet optimized to minimize the time to required to ensure they are proficient at supporting the customer experience
- Support – how do we incentivize, support, coach and develop our people to succeed while simultaneously improving EX, all while ensuring we create a positive financial return for the business
- Measure – how do we provide consolidated reporting to ensure performance is aligned with expectations, identify anomalies, captures the employee experience and protects our compliance to regulatory requirements
Only once you’ve done this for the entirety of your customer journey you should consider where you can automate and look for AI-based cost savings. If your processes can’t be implemented manually with people, it’s going to create even more chaos if you attempt to automate with poorly defined processes.
When you train robots with bad information, you get bad robots!
Cost Planning: Making the Business Case
So cool, now we have an optimized CX journey, a plan to improve CX through the right people management processes – but what’s the impact to the bottom line?
How are we going to ensure this makes financial sense?
First thing first, capture your current total cost and cost per contact of your current spend on CX. Capture and account for every current dollar being spent on BPO’s and your internal teams managing and supporting your outsourced teams, including the current cost of your tech stack that you pay for your BPO to utilize.
You’ll need to compare that to the new costs associated with:
- Talent Acquisition – Sourcing, Screening and Selecting
- Training & Onboarding
- Pay, Benefits and Incentives
- Facilities
- Tech Infrastructure Investment
- Additional Tech Software and AI-automation spend
- Leadership, Workforce Planning, Reporting
- Ongoing training, coaching and support
Then tie that to your expected improvements in:
- First-Call Resolution, increasing CX and your savings against current cost per call
- Reduction in customer churn through improved CX – it costs 5-7X more to acquire a new customer than to retain old ones5
- Increase in revenue per contact measured by improved cross-selling,
- Expected increase in LTV (lifetime value) by improving the Total Experience through improved alignment across the brand experience and customer experience
No plan is complete without a detailed financial business case to make this investment make sense.
Bringing It All Together: Total Experience, Real Results
To quote the legendary leadership expert Peter Drucker, “If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail”, but as former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson also so eloquently stated, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”.
If you’ve executed the recommendations so far you likely have an adequate plan, but you’ll need to be prepared to pivot.
This is where ensuring you’ve collaborated with great technology service partners to help you – be it for recruiting, training, workforce planning, learning management systems, knowledge management systems, omni-channel conversation delivery, AI-agent assist, autonomous AI-Agents, conversation analytics, gamification, performance coaching, reporting, or compliance systems – the right technology partners will make the ultimate difference.
Uniting with the right technology partners who can assist you in your journey of creating alignment throughout your company – based on what you and your customers need – across the entirety of the customer experience journey is essential
Whether you’re considering to “in-source” your contact center, to use these strategies to optimize your existing outsourced services or create a new hybrid environment of outsourcing and insourcing – customer expectations have changed.
Tomorrow’s winners in CX and business itself will be those who connect and align every step of the customer and employee journey for not just service, but true value for a Total Experience.
About the Author
Brent Pattison is the founder of 3P Solutions, a consulting firm helping organizations align people, processes, and technology to unlock the full potential of their customer experience operations.
With over 20 years of global CX executive leadership experience, Brent has built and scaled contact center ecosystems on behalf of Fortune 100 companies across North America, LATAM and Asia-Pacific.
He is the creator of the 3P Alignment Assessment, designed to optimize customer and employee journeys, while improving the overall Business Experience. He’s also the author of PRAISE, the Cornerstone of Coaching to Success and customizes and delivers leadership development programs that help organizations build high-performing teams and future-ready operations.
About Star Telecom
Star Telecom is a leading provider of cloud-based communication and contact center solutions, trusted by organizations across North America to create seamless customer experiences.
As a partner to businesses of all sizes, Star Telecom specializes in helping companies deploy and optimize CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) and UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) platforms. With deep expertise in integrating these technologies into existing ecosystems, Star Telecom enables organizations to create scalable, secure, and future-ready customer experience operations.
From omnichannel routing and CRM integration to AI-powered tools and advanced analytics, Star Telecom helps businesses align their technology stack with their customer journey – driving operational efficiency and customer loyalty.
References
1https://www.forrester.com/press-newsroom/forrester-global-customer-experience-index-2025-rankings/
2https://www.genesys.com/resources/state-of-cx
3https://www.forrester.com/research/total-experience-score/
5https://www.forrester.com/what-it-means/ep04-rethinking-customer-loyalty/