Say yes to less: Shrink the stack to multiply your ROI

The cloud migration that swept through enterprises delivered on many promises, but simplification wasn’t one of them. Many enterprises are wrangling dozens of largely disconnected platforms, yet only extracting a fraction of their value.*

While your software platforms may be world-class, their interoperability may not be – a particular problem for customer experience and contact centre operations.

The hidden cost of platform proliferation

As enterprises manage an increasing number of applications and tools, many report that a significant portion of their licences are underused or redundant, contributing to cloud wastage estimated at more than 25% of global spend.*

Free from traditional barriers like hardware procurement and lengthy IT approvals, business units could instantly satisfy every need. Need a project management tool? There’s an app for that. Customer feedback? Add it to the stack. Specialised analytics? Spin one up.

CIOs and CDOs face the same frustrations

Executives consistently tell us they want to consolidate their technology footprint down to a smaller set of key strategic platforms to lower costs, enhance customer experience and employee satisfaction, and simplify operations.

To achieve this, they’re doubling down on best-of-breed core platforms. The breadth of capability in modern business platforms means organisations can consolidate ‘many with one’. However, even after reducing platform complexity, the true value lies in integrating the digital business.

Step 1

REDUCE the platform chaos

Successful platform consolidation requires three key decisions:

But reduction alone isn’t the answer. Many organisations discover that buying systems designed to work together and actually linking them are two different things.

Step 2

INTEGRATE for seamless workflows

Maximising returns relies on making your systems work as a holistic connected environment. Consider a typical cross-functional workflow: a customer enquiry starts in your contact centre, requires input from field service, needs approval from finance and updates multiple backend systems.

Even with best-of-breed tools handling each step, the reality remains clunky:

Data remains trapped in silos across applications
Teams continue switching between multiple systems for simple tasks
Context is lost at handoff points between business units
Manual processes persist despite automation investments
Brand and experience are eroded

The orchestration opportunity:

When systems are properly connected, each does what it does best while seamlessly sharing context in the background. Customer service tools excel at managing interactions. Enterprise service management systems excel at workflow automation. The magic happens when they work together with a common orchestration layer.

Step 3

MULTIPLY your ROI through connected experiences

The transformation from disconnected systems to connected experiences creates a multiplier effect. What this looks like in practice:

Consider the modern digital experience when you order your favourite pizza these days. The system knows your preferences, processes your order, coordinates the kitchen, runs quality control, tracks delivery in real-time and updates you at every step. Behind the scenes, this integrates sales, inventory, operations, payments, logistics and customer service systems.

A question we often work on with leaders is: How do we create an equivalent frictionless experience for your organisation?

Real-world results:

In a recent project, Nexon helped a customer cut critical forensic test results from 420 days to under 20 days when law enforcement agencies connected their workflow systems
Healthcare organisations cut processing workflows from months to days when systems share context efficiently
Government agencies achieve massive efficiency gains by connecting citizen-facing applications with backend processing
Financial services reduce customer onboarding friction through connected experiences

The ROI multiplier effect:

While isolated systems deliver linear returns – you get what you pay for from each tool – connected environments deliver exponential returns greater than the sum of their parts. Furthermore, AI capabilities unlock their full potential when they can access unified data.

As we explored recently, the perfect time for AI investment will never arrive, but integrated platforms make you AI-ready today.

The market is responding fast

A significant example is the collaboration between customer experience and enterprise service management leaders ServiceNow and Genesys, whose new purpose-built integrations create unified agent workspaces, shared data layers and smooth workflow orchestration.

By managing customer interactions and internal processes as a single, connected workflow, organisations can work with fewer systems, tighter integration and multiplied ROI from investments that work together as intended.

Ask yourself these questions:

Do more than three teams use separate workflow tools?

Are you paying for licences and capabilities that are not being used?

Does one customer request touch three or more systems before it is resolved?

If you answer ‘yes’ to any of these, your ROI multiplier awaits.

Every day your existing systems operate in isolation is unrealised value from your investments. The approach is straightforward. The execution requires expertise, but the payoff makes it one of the highest-value investments any organisation can make.