Beyond the Call Center: Unifying CX, One Definition at a Time (Finally!)

Beginning of September 2025, the CRM Magazine published its 2025 CRM Industry Leader Awards on Destination CRM. This year, the awards nominate five outstanding companies across eleven categories. As in recent years, CRM Magazine asked some renowned analysts to chose Industry Leaders for 2025 using a simple question: “If you had to recommend a CRM solution—whether an enterprise suite, contact center infrastructure, or a customer data platform—to a client, what would they choose, and why?”

And, of course, the analysts – being analysts – gave their answers. And good answers they are.

But this is not the topic of this post. 

What is it then? Glad you asked …

It is about the term “unified customer experience platform” and the corresponding award category. Looking at the winners and their corresponding descriptions, it turns out that there seems to be a clear dominance of customer service and contact center solutions in this area – with the exception of the honorary mention of Sprinklr, which has its origins in the social media sphere.

This dominance suggests that customer experience is somehow made equivalent to customer service. This shows quite some success of the narratives that CCaaS and customer service vendors are telling. This is especially true if very renowned analysts, who are in part thought leaders as well, follow it.

Which somewhat irks me. And it reminds me of how the term CRM got more and more appropriated by vendors of sales force automation, SFA, solutions, until CRM almost became synonymous to SFA, which it isn’t. And never was.

Again, this is not about the winners. They are great and very successful companies in their own rights. But, to me, customer experience platform is not equal to customer service or contact center. It is rather a term that describes a more holistic category. I’d argue that both, customer service and contact center are part of a customer experience platform – if there is one single solution that makes up this platform at all. Or can make up one.

Let’s decompose the term into its three main components, namely “unified”, “customer experience”, and “platform”. 

I want to start with customer experience.

Using the definition of Paul Greenberg, customer experience is “how a customer feels about a company over time”. Bruce Temkin defined customer experience similarly as “the perception that customers have of their interactions with an organization”. So, let’s just roll with these. 

Both, especially Temkin’s definition, are about multiple interactions. Neither limits the type of interactions. So, essentially, the customer experienced is a result of all interactions, across all channels and on all journeys customers are when interacting with a company. This is the complete customer life cycle. From a CRM point of view, this includes marketing, sales, and service. It also includes interactions with products or services themselves. 

What both definitions implicitly include is the notion of measurement; so, it needs an analytics component.

The basis for all of this is data, reliable data. Data that covers all (digital) interactions that a customer has with a brand, which makes up a customer profile.

This brings us to the term “unified”

Customers interact with companies on a variety of channels. In order to make this interaction data really useful, companies must work on creating a unique profile of a customer, i.e., harmonize or unify customer profiles from several, potentially disjoint sources, to become a single authoritative one that enables the reliable identification of a customer. 

The data coming from different sources also requires a governance process. How does the data need to look like, how can the underlying data structures be amended or changed, which data sources exist, and which take precedence, who owns it, who is able to change or interfere, how does data age? All these questions, and more, need to be answered.

Me being me, I will add that customer consent is an essential part of all this. 

For a customer to have an individual experience, this data needs to be activated and be supplied to the downstream systems with which the customer interacts. I’ll call this an engagement. This requires omnichannel capabilities, if not even the ability to be channel agnostic. The customer interactions often, if not mostly, need to be personalized, at least to some degree. In some instances, interactions also require real-time capabilities. This is necessary e.g., when engaged in a chat with a digital agent or a customer service agent, or even when a promotion shall be served to the web site. In other situations, timing requirements are less strict. 

To round this off, a notion of journey and journey orchestration is required. After all, customers are interacting with companies to get a solution to a problem or just some information. In any case, some steps, often across channels, are required to accomplish this. These steps need to be orchestrated to be most effective for both parties, customer and company.

Last, but not least, platform

According to Merriam Webster, a platform in a computer science sense is “an application or website that serves as a base from which a service is provided”. The service in this case is customer engagement with the goal of the customer having a good or better customer experience. Note, the systems do not “deliver” an experience. They allow the customer to have one.

The platform provides the scalability of the overall system. It also provides the APIs that are necessary to effectively and efficiently communicate with potential up- and downstream systems. Plus, it provides the foundation for storing and activating the data, so that it can be used for individual interactions. Technically, this is the strong analytical component that I referred to above, and which is also necessary for the journey orchestration component. As customer requirements change, the analytics component needs to be supported by an AI / machine learning solution.

And what does this mean?

In the first instance this means that the appropriation of the term unified customer experience platform by customer service and CCaaS vendors diminishes the value this type of platform can deliver. It also means that there is a sore lack of a definition. During the 2018 CRM Evolution conference, I spoke about rethinking CRM to become CEM. As part of this, I proposed a customer experience architecture, which I think is still relevant.

I defined this architecture an open platform that consistently receives customer signals and processes these data (legally) in a way that companies can serve customers with information that is relevant for them in context. One of the core objectives is to break down silos, department silos as well as data silos. Today, I will go a few steps further.

Unified Customer Experience Platform – a definition

A unified customer experience platform is an open software solution that enables businesses to engage in consistent and personalized interactions with customers, across all touchpoints and journeys, based on a unified customer profile.

This definition caters to all the points I discussed above. 

On checking, it is also quite close to the definition of a delivery CDP by the Customer Data Platform Institute. 

So, a unified customer experience platform might rather be a concept than a software category. This is actually what I do think.

But more importantly: What do you think?