Why CX Drives Growth for Mid-Market and Enterprise Businesses

(CX isn’t a buzzword – it’s your bottom line)

There’s a reason everyone in our industry keeps talking about Customer Experience (CX). It’s not because we’ve run out of things to say – it’s because customers have run out of patience.

For New Zealand mid-market organisations (and those big-enough-to-be-complex but not quite “global enterprise”), CX isn’t a shiny add-on. It’s the difference between keeping a customer for 7+ years or losing them to a provider that answers the phone faster, offers digital self-service, and actually knows who they are when they call.

At the Future of CX Summit in Auckland, where Digital Island was in the room with New Zealand’s CX leaders, our CEO Leon Sheehan said it plainly in his keynote:

“CX has to move from a project to a business outcome. If customers can’t reach you, can’t be identified, or have to repeat themselves, it shows up in revenue – not just in satisfaction scores.”

That’s the heart of this blog.

The industry context: CX is moving into operations

For a long time, CX was owned by marketing and sat in decks. Now it’s being pulled into operations, contact centre, IT, and finance – because those are the teams that feel the pain when service breaks.

Why? Because NZ businesses are being asked to do three things at once:

  1. Stay human – local, reachable, “I can talk to someone”.
  2. Scale digitally – offer chat, email, messaging, self-service.
  3. Do it cost-efficiently – especially in a year where budgets are tight.

That is exactly why cloud platforms like Amazon Connect (Contact Centre as a Service) plus Verint add-ons (for quality, workforce engagement, and insight) are getting traction: they give you enterprise-grade CX without the painful, long, capex-heavy change.

The challenge for mid-market and “not-quite-enterprise” NZ businesses

Most of the organisations we talk to fall into this bucket:

  • Multiple customer touchpoints, but they don’t talk to each other.
  • Agents switching screens to find info.
  • Inconsistent experience between phone, email, and web.
  • No single reporting view for leadership.
  • IT teams stretched, so projects take too long.
  • And the big one: CX and EX are disconnected.

Let’s pause on that last one.

You cannot build great Customer Experience (CX) without great Employee Experience (EX). If your agents don’t have context, if they have to re-authenticate a customer three times, if they are handling angry customers because another channel failed – your EX is poor, and your CX will follow.

That is why modern CX stacks are moving to one cloud-based layer that ties together voice, chat, routing, knowledge, and reporting.

So what does “good” look like?

For a mid-market NZ business, “good CX” in 2025 looks like this:

  • Customers can contact you the way they prefer – voice, webchat, email, messaging – and you can route it all in one place. (That’s CCaaS.)
  • Your people can collaborate easily – call, video, message, one directory, same identity. (That’s UCaaS.)
  • You have AI-assisted agents – smart prompts, summaries, real-time guidance (this is where Verint add-ons become powerful).
  • Leaders can see the whole CX operation – interactions, queues, agent performance, sentiment – in one dashboard.
  • Commercially, it’s pay-for-what-you-use – which is why Amazon Connect is so compelling right now.

This is exactly the operational lens you wanted: CX as service resilience, omnichannel, AI-assisted agents, not just “let’s delight customers”.

Real-world example (anonymised NZ mid-market)

A New Zealand services business with ~250 staff and a mixed customer base across the country came to Digital Island with a familiar issue:

  • Their legacy contact centre couldn’t support webchat and voice in one place.
  • They had no visibility on which queues were missing SLAs.
  • Their agents were working across three tools to answer one customer.
  • CX was being reported to the board, but operations didn’t have live data.

We helped them move to an Amazon Connect-centred model, with Verint layered in for quality and workforce engagement. The change meant:

  • one omnichannel experience for customers;
  • agents seeing customer history in one pane;
  • leaders getting real-time dashboards; and
  • the part your CFO will like – a model that automatically scales up and down as needed – no need to commit to expensive licencing that may never be used

That’s CX driving growth: higher satisfaction, fewer missed interactions, faster onboarding of new agents, and customers actually staying.

Why this matters now

  1. Economic pressure in NZ means customers are more selective – they will leave if service is slow or inconsistent.
  2. Hybrid work means your agents and contact centre teams aren’t always in the same building – so you need cloud-first CX and UC.
  3. AI and automation are maturing – if you don’t embed them into your contact centre now, you’ll be playing catch-up in 2026.
  4. Your competitors are already at events like the Future of CX Summit – they’re not just listening, they’re piloting.

Being in that room in Auckland with CX leaders showed one thing clearly: CX maturity is becoming a differentiator in New Zealand, not a nice-to-have.

How Digital Island helps

Digital Island sits in an unusual sweet spot for NZ businesses:

  • We understand contact centre and cloud telephony – it’s in our DNA.
  • We work with Amazon Connect for scalable, consumption-based CX.
  • We layer in Verint for quality, workforce management, and richer insights.
  • We speak the language of business outcomes – not just tech.
  • And we’re local – so we know what “my customer wants to talk to a person” actually means here.

If you’re looking at modernising your contact centre, or you want to create a joined-up CX/EX environment without a 12-month IT project, we should talk.

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Jargon explained (quick)

  • CCaaS (Contact Centre as a Service): A cloud-based way to run your contact centre without buying heavy infrastructure.
  • UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service): Your calling, meetings, and messaging all in one cloud platform.
  • CX (Customer Experience): How customers feel about every interaction with you.
  • EX (Employee Experience): How your internal people experience the tools, processes, and culture you give them – and how easy it is for them to serve customers.