Customer expectations have evolved drastically in the last few years. Increasingly, today’s customers bank on businesses being able to offer them convenient, streamlined, and personalized experiences across every channel. Unfortunately, many organizations are still failing to live up to these expectations, struggling with a lack of aligned data and insights.
Delivering amazing customer experiences means knowing how to effectively serve audiences throughout their entire purchasing journey. Companies need to be supportive and innovative from the moment their customers first discover an issue they need to solve, to the point when they’re calling support teams for guidance and help. The only way to succeed in this process is with the right tools for collecting, processing, and understanding customer data.
Customer journey orchestration platforms are powerful, AI-enhanced toolkits which allow companies to gain complete visibility into every touchpoint a customer has with their brand. Here’s everything businesses need to know about the value and impact of these solutions.
Don Spaulding, Sr. Principal – Business Strategy, Verizon Business Group says:
“Customer journeys are becoming increasingly complex. In today’s unpredictable economy, customers are searching for ways to make more intelligent purchasing decisions. They want to work with companies that understand the stages of their journey, and work with them to progressively move them towards their goal. Being able to effectively map and orchestrate the customer journey is crucial to closing the gaps in the CX landscape.”
An Introduction to Customer Journey Orchestration
Customer journey orchestration is the art of coordinating customer experiences throughout an evolving omnichannel landscape, to better serve and support clients.
63% of companies say their top objective today is to improve the effectiveness of their existing customer service journeys, to meet customer expectations. Additionally, 69% of companies that implement initiatives to optimize the customer journey say they see positive outcomes, such as increased brand loyalty, higher customer lifetime values, and greater profits.
Unfortunately, effectively orchestrating an incredible customer journey can be complex. Today’s businesses often struggle to get a clear view of customer needs, as journey information is distributed across different communication platforms and tools. Customer journey orchestration platforms resolve this problem, providing an all-in-one environment where teams can consolidate customer information, track crucial metrics, and convert untapped data into actionable insights.
Utilizing the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, customer journey orchestration platforms provide a comprehensive view of customer experiences. Machine learning models can analyze customer intent and behavior on a massive scale, drawing insights from interactions on every channel used by the business.
Predictive tools can help businesses more effectively schedule agents and forecast demand, as well as ensuring customers are routed to the most relevant agent based on their needs. Orchestration platforms can even help businesses personalize customer interactions more effectively, assisting in the creation of dynamic, evolving customer profiles and segments.
Perhaps most importantly, these orchestration platforms educate and inform businesses, allowing leaders to tap into the data they need to create more effective marketing, sales, and service funnels.
What Can Companies Do with a Journey Orchestration Platform?
Customer journey orchestration platforms empower businesses to apply a digital-first, outcome-based customer engagement model to their CX strategy. By consolidating and unifying data across channels, and transforming raw information into insights with artificial intelligence, these toolkits unlock benefits for both businesses and customers alike.
First, the customer benefits from a more unified, aligned experience, personalized to suit their specific needs, goals, and requirements. Secondly, companies benefit from a powerful way to optimize customer journeys, improving crucial metrics such as customer satisfaction score, and enhancing business productivity and efficiency.
With the right customer journey orchestration platform, businesses can:
- Drive customers towards their goals: AI tools can provide insights into customer intent, and preferences based on prior experiences and insights. This means businesses can ensure every interaction with a customer is valuable, and memorable on any channel.
- Reduce costs: With predictive technology, customer journey orchestration tools can help businesses to foresee potential problems customers might face, so they can create efficient self-service strategies for clients, reducing repeat call volume.
- Improve agent efficiency: With behind-the-scenes insights into customers, businesses can more effectively route customers to the right agent based on their specific stage in the customer journey, and their needs. This minimizes the need for transfers and improves first call resolution rates, leading to higher levels of satisfaction.
- Develop powerful customer profiles: With consolidated data from across the customer journey landscape, businesses can develop a more accurate view of their target audience, and use this to create profiles that generate better sales, marketing, and sales results.
- Deliver personalized service: 66% of customers now expect companies to understand their needs in advance. Customer journey orchestration platforms give organizations the tools they need to identify each customer and create more personalized, relevant experiences.
Customer Journey orchestration tools can even help businesses to reduce costs and increase sales, by providing insights into the issues customers face, and paving the way for the creation of more loyal, dedicated consumers.
The Benefits of the Best Journey Orchestration Platforms
As customer experience continues to thrive as the most important factor for any business to prioritize in the modern world, customer journey orchestration platforms are growing increasingly important. These intuitive tools can unlock a host of benefits, using state-of-the-art technology and insights. Leading solutions such as Verizon and Genesys’ Pointillist platform, provide companies with an all-in-one toolkit for analyzing, understanding, and optimizing customer journeys.
With built-in artificial intelligence, access to digital assistance tools such as chatbots and voice bots, and guidance for agents, these leading platforms enhance employee and customer experiences simultaneously. With the right toolkit, companies can:
- Close customer service gaps: The best customer journey orchestration tools provide crucial context to agents, making it easier to ensure every customer gets the right service straight away. The right platforms assist with the creation of valuable customer profiles agents can use to improve first-call resolution rates, reduce lost calls, and minimize frustrations.
- Align the omnichannel CX strategy: As consumers continue to interact with companies across a range of different channels and platforms, it’s becoming ever-more important to retain context and insights from one environment to the next. Customer journey orchestration tools align different components of the CX landscape, synchronizing service strategies.
- Boost team productivity: Companies not only improve customer experience with journey orchestration, but agent experiences too. The right tools empower agents to perform more effectively, solve issues quickly, and work more collaboratively on customer-facing campaigns. Every team gets the insights they need to achieve their goals.
- Drive intelligent decisions: With the consolidated data collected by customer journey orchestration platforms, business leaders can make decisions that lead to higher customer lifetime value, increased retention, greater average order values, and reduced churn.
Ultimately, a customer journey orchestration platform could be the most powerful tool business leaders can access if they want to effectively understand, and optimize customer experiences in an increasingly competitive world.
