5 Reasons Brands Need To Evolve From Legacy CX Systems

When all other aspects of business are running smoothly, ecommerce brands and their leadership tend to turn a blind eye to CX. While it may not seem urgent at the moment, there are risks to not upgrading legacy CX systems. Most significantly, using an outdated system can undermine a brand’s ability to build lasting, high-value customer relationships. However, for colleagues who aren’t daily users of CX software, the reasons to switch may seem inconsequential.

In this post, Gladly lays out the top five reasons why now — not later — is the perfect time to transition away from older, legacy-based customer service systems and software. Plus, with the availability of more flexible and technologically advanced CX solutions, brands can find replacement solutions that support their growth and consistently increase revenue.

5 Reasons for Upgrading Legacy CX Systems

1. Legacy CX Systems Are Disjointed

Legacy CX systems are notorious for using ticketing methods, which are not conducive to fostering strong customer relationships. They fail to account for the historical context of each customer conversation, providing agents with no help in understanding each shopper’s previous experience with the brand.

Learn more: Impact of Using Ticket-Based vs. Customer-Based CX Platforms

The Gladly Advantage

Gladly conversation timelines provide a streamlined, centralized view of a customer’s interactions with your brand, regardless of the timeframe or channel in which it occurred. This gives a clear picture of each shopper’s history with your brand and helps you build a relationship through consistent, relevant conversations — something legacy brands like Genesys fail to do by comparison.

Gladly customer JOANN was dealing with a disjointed, ticket-based legacy system that made their service far from human-centric and created a sizable backlog of requests their agents struggled to handle. By switching their system over to Gladly Hero, JOANN saw a 93% decrease in their backlog. This new, more efficient system also helped agents respond to emails 70% faster and reduced new agent onboarding time to a mere five days.

2. Legacy CX Systems Cost More Money

While upgrading your CX solutions might require an upfront payment for new technology and onboarding, legacy systems will cost you more in the long run. These less sophisticated tools often leave money on the table by failing to drive upsell and cross-sell opportunities amongst agents. Brands also wind up paying for features and functions that they never use, but are a part of bundled pricing.

Rather than seeing CX as a line item on your balance sheet, smart technology should be providing high ROI thanks to improved customer satisfaction and higher lifetime value.

Peak Design faced a high volume of requests that their legacy CX system just couldn’t handle. From returns and warranties to order tracking requests, their team was struggling to ensure each customer was properly satisfied.

After combining the use of Gladly Hero and Gladly Sidekick, Peak Design was able to automate 100% of these requests — achieving a 98% customer satisfaction score and receiving a 91% ROI from their new system.

The Gladly Advantage

Gladly empowers agents with deep knowledge of products and customers, making them experts in identifying new sales opportunities. Shoppers are more willing to spend with brands that treat them like people, rather than tickets — a big reason why companies prefer Gladly over Zendesk.

Learn more: 3 Customer Service Agent Training Tips for Product Expertise

3. Legacy CX Systems Lack the Benefit of AI

Few legacy CX systems are set up to handle technological advances like AI, and even those that are tend to not use it to its full advantage. Without the power of AI and automation to streamline support center activities, agents are burdened with repetitive tasks. For example, brands that are implementing AI are reducing or simplifying these tasks:

• Replying to customers in real-time
• Summarizing customer conversations
• Answering common customer questions

Bonafide was struggling to scale its subscription services with its previous legacy CX system. This legacy system couldn’t handle the high volume of conversations happening across each of their channels. After incorporating Gladly Sidekick, Bonafide resolved 54% of their questions using just AI — saving their team 65 hero hours and boosting their ROI to 50%.

The Gladly Advantage

Hero AI from Gladly automates routine tasks in customer interactions, like suggesting quick answers and summarizing conversations. Meanwhile, Sidekick provides intelligent self-service options to customers with round-the-clock support for solving everyday issues.

Gladly received SOC 2 certification for data compliance, which means that while our AI is informed by shopper information, it’s never used improperly. Our commitment to customer data protection in our technology makes us a superior choice over companies like Kustomer which uses customer data explicitly for monetization.

4. New CX Systems Can be Easy to Onboard

The frustration of having to learn an entirely new system could be a pain for employees. However many new solutions are designed to overcome onboarding friction, making it easy to transition your agents from your old system to a new one. These solutions ultimately ensure a more seamless transition away from outdated legacy systems into a more modern infrastructure — without too much pause or lapse in business.

The Gladly Advantage

Gladly is consistently ranked the No. 1 help desk software for usability and onboarding in G2 rankings, with significantly higher scores for ease of use and setup than legacy brands like Salesforce.

Customer Reviews: Onboarding, Training, and Ease of Setup for Gladly

LEARN MORE

For customers like Crate & Barrel, the simplicity of new CX systems like Gladly is key to aiding onboarding and implementation. At the scale of ecommerce this brand is conducting daily, their infrastructure can’t afford to take a significant pause in service without suffering a loss in the quality of customer experience.

Luckily, Gladly provided an all-encompassing onboarding solution, including hands-on support and technical guidance throughout the process. Here’s what Crate & Barrel had to say about their experience switching from a legacy system to Gladly:

“Having all of our channels on one platform really helped us with onboarding new associates, and helping with new customers as well.”

5. New CX Systems Are Scalable and Future-Proof

Upgrading legacy systems with new technology will require additional infrastructure, including adding and paying for new licenses to match your ever-growing team numbers. Meanwhile, newer solutions can naturally incorporate AI and scale sustainably alongside your brand. Choosing this future-proof technology is a wise long-term decision, instead of clinging to outdated legacy systems.

The head of CX for a premier skincare brand supported by Gladly was finding rapid growth overwhelming when it came to scaling to satisfy the demands of their two million customers. With the help of Gladly Sidekick, their team cleared 100% of its backlog and resolved 25% of their incoming conversations — leaving room for their agents to handle more complex tasks.

The Gladly Advantage

Gladly comes with features for every conceivable support channel out of the box, while providing a scalable pricing model that makes it easy and cost-effective to grow your support center alongside your business. Fast-growing brands prefer Gladly over options like Gorgias, which are less growth-friendly.

Switching from a legacy CX system is only the first step in this journey — you should continue to think about how you can improve efficiencies and CX processes as your business scales. Nari Sitaraman, Chief Technology Officer at BARK Inc., covered this topic during a Gladly webinar, sharing how using new CX systems that incorporate AI can help businesses scale more effectively — along with the value of asking for agent and customer feedback when making system and features selections.

Ditch the Legacy Systems for Better Overall CX

Upgrading legacy systems with newer CX or customer service software might seem daunting and may require some persuading and buy-in from your organization’s leadership team higher-ups. However, despite initial hesitations from executives, the positive ROI from updating legacy systems is undeniable, such as:

• Access to new AI-driven solutions
• Quick, efficient onboarding and implementation
• Long-term cost savings

Wondering if it’s time for your company to explore newer CX systems? Explore the Gladly platform and see how a state-of-the-art CX solution can transform the way your business builds valuable customer relationships, paving the way for significant growth.

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