What has to be true before a CX platform or AI decision is worth making.

Every function has a boundary around its data. Under normal conditions those boundaries cause friction and people absorb it — an agent opens four applications and copies an account number from one screen to another. It is inefficient and it works. Automation meets every one of those boundaries at once, and it cannot improvise.

An illustration — the assistant that cannot see

A voice assistant is deployed to handle billing enquiries. Customer Service owns the relationship. The data needed to resolve a dispute sits in an ERP governed by Finance. The authentication logs that would confirm who is calling belong to IT. There is no cross-functional data governance, so the assistant can reach neither. It becomes a spoken FAQ: it can see there is a billing question, cannot look at the account, and transfers the customer to somebody who can. The organisation has bought a platform and added a step.

What to do before the RFP

Map what the automation has to touch

Put Operations, IT, Finance and Legal in one room and define precisely which systems have to be reached to resolve a query end to end.

Establish data stewardship

Move from departmental ownership to shared governance. Where a function will not open an interface, that use case is not viable and should be shelved before software is bought, not after.

Most organisations run on quiet manual correction: spreadsheets that reconcile two systems nobody has integrated, rules experienced staff apply without being asked, knowledge about which record to believe when two disagree. These corrections are invisible from the executive floor, because they work. Automation removes all of them at once.

An illustration — the confident wrong answer

A long-standing customer calls. The CRM shows the account active with a negotiated arrangement in the relationship history. Billing shows it suspended after an overnight batch failed. The address changed last week; the CRM has the new one and billing does not, because the sync failed without raising an error. The automation queries both, finds a conflict it has no rule for, and does what it was built to do — it defaults to billing. A customer who has not missed a payment in five years is told the account is suspended, then transferred to an agent who receives none of that context.

The platform worked exactly as designed. The data underneath it did not.

What to do before the RFP

Audit the source of truth

List the entities that matter — identity, account status, balance, contact details, recent interactions — and document which system holds the master record for each. Where two systems both claim it, that is a finding.

Fix the integration, not the interpretation

No platform cleans data in flight, whatever is implied. Require real-time integration that reconciles records before automation reads them, and treat any claim to resolve conflicts at runtime as something to be tested rather than believed.

Business rules decide who gets priority, how a refund is calculated, when an account is held for review. They live in three places: configured in a system, carried in the heads of experienced staff, or nowhere at all. The rules that live nowhere are the ones automation will inherit without anyone deciding that it should.

An illustration — the rule nobody wrote down

An airline contact centre automates cancellations. Over several years the frontline has adopted an informal practice: where a customer is reasonable and has been with the airline for some years, the processing fee is waived. It is in no handbook and no system. The automation reads the configured rules correctly and applies the fee to everybody. Long-standing customers who have never been charged it before are charged it now. Complaints rise, escalations follow, and the platform is blamed for being rigid when it has done nothing except execute the only rules it was given.

What to do before the RFP

Find the workflows nobody documented

Sit with your strongest agents. Record what they do, not what the training material says they should do. The gap between the two is the material.

Standardise before you automate

A rule that cannot be expressed as a clean conditional is not ready to be automated. Resolve the logic on paper first, and decide deliberately which discretion you intend to keep.