Why are brands snubbing best-of-breed tech in favour of single service CX providers?

The best-of-breed model of technology procurement may have had its day - at least, when it comes to customer experience technology, anyway. 

While previously it was common for companies to adopt a best-of-breed strategy – utilising two or more different CX vendors to support their requirements – new research has revealed that most organisations are now preferring to standardise on a single CX platform.

The survey, conducted by Ryan Strategic Advisory on behalf of TELUS International, highlighted a significant shift in more organisations opting to consolidate CX providers in recent times.

The results revealed that 51% of enterprises are now using a single service provider, with 44% engaged with only two to three providers. This is indicative of a wider trend, which has seen enterprises who were in the process of reducing their number of providers grow from 27% in 2017, to 44% in 2020, to 50% in 2022.

But why are more and more organisations making the switch to single service providers?

Why is single service CX so appealing?

The main reason for the steady shift towards single service CX is the increase in complexity of the services available to organisations, which has resulted in an increase in requirements and expectations.

Of the 668 global executives surveyed, 40% indicated that they would leave a CX provider if they were unable to provide all of the complex digital CX services they required.

Moreover, 65% revealed that they receive two or more services from a single CX partner, with 58% of respondents stating that this number had increased since the start of the pandemic.

These numbers were even higher for some of the more complex branches of CX services. Areas such as artificial intelligence (67%), digital IT (68%), content moderation (72%), and digital CX (77%) all admitted to using a single CX partner.

In discussing the findings of the survey, CCO of TELUS International, Maria Pardee, commented: “We’re seeing enterprises rethinking their existing CX partnerships to form fewer, stronger, trusted relationships that encompass the full spectrum of capabilities and expertise to implement, evolve and scale their end-to-end CX strategy."

Peter Ryan, the principal analyst at Ryan Strategic Advisory, also commented on organisations looking to build trusted relationships with their CX providers: “Companies are no longer looking to diversify their CX partner footprint, rather they are looking to form a trusted partnership with far fewer, or even just a single provider that has the breadth and scope of experience and solutions to offer end-to-end services that span across the full customer experience value chain.”

However, Ryan also discussed some of the more practical elements that he believes are affecting the relationships between enterprises and CX partners: “Significant world events such as the pandemic exponentially accelerating consumers’ digital adoption, to having increasingly limited internal resources to manage multiple external CX partners, to not having the in-house digital expertise needed to design, build and deliver today’s more complex digital CX solutions and services.”