Harnessing the power of experience orchestration

In today’s digital economy, customers expect seamless experiences no matter where they interact with a brand. Companies face ever-growing pressure to deliver or risk losing out on their loyalty. Making customers feel remembered, heard, and understood across every interaction with a brand is essential. Equally, it needs to feel like it’s effortless to find answers, perform common tasks, and get help. But this isn’t always straightforward to achieve, and organisations are falling at the first hurdle time and time again.

The key challenge organisations face in transforming their customer experience usually comes down to outdated, reactive customer experience strategies. These fail to take into account the full customer journey, missing out on vital context that helps businesses get closer to customers. Legacy software creates silos between departments and, more critically, data that gives employees the insights they need to provide meaningful solutions. For customers, this results in a disjointed and impersonal experience, causing frustration with employees bearing the brunt. As it stands, too few organisations are taking advantage of the cloud and adopting modern solutions that allow them to free themselves of legacy constraints.

Research has shown how interactions often result in customers feeling angry, so much so that a quarter have lost their temper with an employee supporting them with an issue in the last 12 months. In some cases, these bad experiences have driven more than one in ten customers to tears. Not only does this risk customer abandonment, but employee abandonment too when under such high levels of stress.

So, with not only customer loyalty and brand reputation on the line, but employee satisfaction, it’s vital that businesses act now. So, how can they take the necessary steps to modernise their technology strategies and implement solutions in ways that create fulfilling and meaningful experiences for all involved?

A human-centric approach

Transforming experiences today starts with putting the needs of customers and employees first. Crucial steps that organisations must take includes tying together the end-to-end customer journey by coordinating technologies, connecting data, and shifting to more proactive approaches to experience delivery.

In retail, this could be the delivery of target offers and notifications at the ‘right time’ to help customers more easily find, learn about, and buy products. In finance, it might be personalised banking sessions driven by information consolidated from across a customer's portfolio, history and communications preferences. In the travel sector, this could be sending alerts on delays and disruptions to customers, which in turn, help make trips as smooth as possible.

Brands must get better at pulling together relevant information from different systems to carry context that can be integrated across all interactions. The price of failure to act? Our research concluded a third of consumers abandoned a brand for a competitor in the past 12 months alone as the result of a bad customer experience.

Organisations simply cannot afford to get customer experience wrong any longer. Instead, businesses must switch to more relevant, more personalised, and more proactive strategies, which is where experience orchestration enters the picture.

Breaking down departmental silos

A fundamental principle that every organisation must realise is that experiences are happening whether they plan for them or not. Instead of reacting to people’s needs, companies must anticipate them, and design experiences centred around them from the start.

The best way to do this now is to unite experiences around a single platform with the power to easily integrate and coordinate technologies, data, and channels across the entire journey. Our research found that customer experience leaders are already on board with this way of thinking, with 71% prioritising the implementation of platforms that integrate all systems.

Once this foundation is in place, companies should consider how to design experiences that are personalised and empathetic, while making it intuitive and simple for customers to accomplish their goals. Digital and artificial intelligence (AI) offer powerful ways to deliver here. However, many brands go wrong by deploying isolated AI-based point solutions aimed at only solving a ‘specific’ problem. This often results in customer frustration, as unhelpful bots or employees are limited with insufficient information, training or siloes. In these cases, all are hamstrung by stagnant data versus real-time knowledge enabled by algorithms, that allow for continuous learning and optimisation.

So rather than solving individual pain points, AI should be deployed with the purpose of connecting the holistic experience in a way that benefits customers, employees, and the organisation's bottom line. A few examples of how experience orchestration powered by AI can improve experiences include:

· Knowing what customers need before they tell you. Customers’ historic data, partnered with behaviour patterns can trigger proactive intervention. Take for example when an airline customer initiates a chat. The employee can instantly see they have searched the company’s FAQs for information on flight change fees, and then offer assistance with rebooking or navigating change fees without the customer needing to ask.

· Putting an end to broken records. Customers shouldn’t have to tell a bot their name, phone number, home address, account number, and their issue, to turn around and have to tell an employee, only to then have to repeat themselves again to the next employee they’re transferred to. When experiences are connected, this information follows the customer wherever they go for a fluid, echo free experience.

· Matching customers with the employees best suited to help. Understanding which employees are best suited to provide the help a customer needs when they need it means customers are more likely to receive the first contact resolutions they want, and employees are able to focus on the areas they do best. A win-win result for all.

Better experiences for all involved

Consumer perceptions of a brand can change in an instant. All it takes is one bad experience for relationships to be damaged and loyalty to be lost. With expectations higher than ever, businesses need to be implementing the necessary framework to stay ahead of their customers’ needs and offer them truly meaningful experiences. Interactions can’t be managed in silos. ‘One-off’ engagements must become a thing of the past. Communications need to account for the entirety of the customer journey, over every touchpoint and channel.

Experience orchestration is about the right coordination of technology across the end-to-end customer journey to nurture long lasting relationships at scale. Businesses need to connect the dots across every step of every experience, so they have one complete view of the customer journey. By applying digital and AI with purpose, organisations can establish a strong methodology for listening to and understanding customers and employees. Then, they can predict actions, shape journeys, and drive meaningful outcomes, offering a truly personalised experience that forges increased loyalty.