Santa Claus faced an ongoing challenge and every Christmas season it grew worse. How to efficiently deliver presents to an estimated 22 million children per hour over the course of one night? Until recently, Santa used his advanced knowledge of the space-time continuum to form “relativity clouds” or rips in time to assist him on these critical journeys. But the explosion of digital channels proved too much even for this jolly old soul and his trusty elves.

 Fortunately, Santa understood that before his reindeer could fly efficiently, he needed a plan that would satisfy his millions of young customers without wasting time or limited resources. “Focus on the desired outcomes,” that’s Santa’s mantra. Let’s dig into his challenge.

Keep it Personal with Omnichannel

At heart, Santa is a traditionalist who sees the value of the personal touch. Hand-written letters are still the channel of choice for many of his pint-sized customers. But interactions are increasing via social media, messaging apps and chat. Santa needs to monitor that data, map and analyze requests—or journeys—throughout the year, and use these insights for planning. This resulted in an omnichannel big data problem. He knew automation would be key to a solution. But it had to satisfy complex requirements for efficiency, personalization and customer satisfaction. Losing his exceptionally loyal customer base would be catastrophic.

A Christmas Light Bulb Goes Off in Santa’s Head

Santa has always been agile and the first to adopt innovation to continuously improve and remain a leader in customer experience. Attending CX17 incognito, Santa first learned about Blended AI from Genesys. With 25 billion interactions a year, Genesys has helped thousands of customers across the globe. It looked like Blended AI could help Santa continue delivering his own brand of magic. First, he did his due diligence and spoke to Genesys customers, participated in a unique build a bot in half a day workshop, and examined analyst research reports before implementing the solution.

Santa Spills the Beans – Discover his 3-Step Approach to Success

By focusing on outcomes, Santa narrowed down his choices to 3 key areas for ongoing success:

  1. With the open and flexible Genesys Customer Experience Platform for omnichannel, he gives his very special customers a seamless experience using the channel and language of their choice.
  2. AI for simple tasks: He uses AI for efficiencies by automating simple tasks. These include identification and authentication, simple personalization, address capture and balance inquiry, where he expertly manages naughty and nice scores.
  3. AI with continual machine learning: He collects and analyzes requests (data) across channels, monitoring individual journeys throughout the year. It’s easy for him to identify journeys with bad outcomes (naughty) early in the year and nudge them toward good outcomes (nice).

Santa now depends on Blended AI for more complex tasks. With Blended AI, he and his team of elves have full knowledge of interactions to provide the best possible experience. For example, he still hand-delivers personalized gifts on Christmas. And while that may introduce the risk of exposure if he’s spotted, for Santa’s business it’s a risk that makes sense to meet customer expectations.

How to Get Started with Blended AI

It doesn’t matter whether your business is based in a major city or at the North Pole. With Blended AI you can now deliver the same high quality of customer experience and improve business efficiency.

Remember: Late adopters risk losing sales opportunities and customer share. While Santa may not have any serious competition at the moment, eventually, everyone does. So, if he misses a single stop on a customer’s journey—let’s say, by not delivering what was requested—that’s only one little customer’s heartbroken. But it’s one too many if you care about building a loyal customer base that comes back again and again for many generations.

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