How Businesses Put Experience Orchestration Into Practice

Giving customers a great experience has become as much a part of strategic planning for businesses as pricing, quality, convenience and other essential components. But for all the thought and new technology put into improving the customer experience (CX), results are mixed — and customers often leave disappointed. And if they’re not getting the experience they want, many will leave. In fact, 31% of consumers say they’ve stopped using a company after a negative interaction in the past year. They’re just not getting the experience they want.

Addressing the Source of the Customer Experience Problem

Customer interactions have evolved significantly over the years with the rise of digital channels and technologies. Today, customers engage with brands through multiple touchpoints, including websites, social media, mobile apps and more.

Yet, they view brands as a single entity, delivering one experience. One bad, slow or otherwise negative interaction can influence their overall experience. They may also vent their frustrations through negative online reviews or social media, which can further tarnish a brand’s reputation and affect customer acquisition efforts.

As a result, businesses need to ensure they deliver consistent, personalized experiences that are relevant to their customers’ needs and expectations. And it shouldn’t matter where customers are in their journeys or which part of your business engages with them. This is where experience orchestration comes into play.

Understanding the Concept of Experience Orchestration

Experience orchestration is the process of integrating customer data from different systems to enable real-time customer journey management. By leveraging the power of data, analytics and automation, businesses can deliver the right information, at the right time, to the right customer, across all touchpoints. By being able to manage the customer journey, from the first touchpoint to the final interaction, businesses create seamless experiences throughout the entire customers’ lifetime with a brand.

The integration of customer data and relevant information from different systems — such as sales, marketing, customer relationship management, service and feedback channels — generates valuable insights. Businesses gain a better understanding of customer behavior, preferences and needs. Then they can tailor interactions and experiences accordingly. Each interaction is personalized, relevant and delivered through the customer’s preferred channel.

The Role of Experience Orchestration in Customer Service

By using this robust customer data, experience orchestration and customer journey orchestration work together to ensure that customer service teams have the right data, context and tools they need to deliver exceptional customer experiences. When businesses break down departmental silos and enable cross-functional collaboration, customers don’t have to repeat information or navigate multiple channels. And that streamlines the entire customer service process.

Customer support agents can create better connections with their customers by anticipating needs, and identify opportunities for up-selling or cross-selling — thereby improving customer satisfaction, loyalty and overall business success. Proactively identifying and addressing customer pain points enables businesses to turn potentially negative experiences into positive ones.

Experience Orchestration in Action

Let’s see how businesses in various industries can use the principles and technology of experience orchestration to deliver consistent customer experiences throughout the entire customer journey — based on the unique needs of each business.

Personalized Marketing Campaigns in Retail

Marketing campaigns are instrumental in enhancing customer engagement. And personalization can dramatically improve retention and loyalty.

According to McKinsey & Company, personalization marketing can reduce customer acquisition costs by as much as 50%, lift revenues by 5–15% and increase marketing ROI by 10–30%. Personalization also improves performance and provides better customer outcomes. Seventy-one percent of consumers expect personalization and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen, according to McKinsey research.

As part of experience orchestration, campaign automation enables marketing teams to efficiently define, execute and analyze hundreds or thousands of campaigns. For example, a marketer might send a message to a customer’s phone that links to a landing page. The content on the page is based on which products that particular customer has.

After submitting the form, the system can automatically send an email with content based on the action taken. Finally, the marketer analyzes click-through rates and conversions to constantly optimize customer engagement.

Customizing the eCommerce Experience

Tailoring online shopping experiences gives individual customers a shopping journey that’s personalized based on known insights about them. This could be general content, product recommendations and offers based on preferences, behavior and demographics.

This level of personalization establishes a strong connection with customers. They feel they’re being heard as they experience a better and more efficient  journey.

Some sites do this by timing or triggering pop-up offers that match a visitor’s behavior. These pop-ups can be set up to trigger automatically based on criteria that’s meaningful to you, such as the number of sessions, shopping cart value or browsing behavior. You can start by offering first-time visitors special discounts and promotions in exchange for their email addresses.

Optimizing Customer Support in Tech

Automating repetitive, simple or predictable tasks is an easy starting point for improving support and, ultimately, enhancing the overall customer experience. You can use bots, autoresponders or self-service options to handle common queries, confirmations or feedback requests. This frees up agents for complex and urgent issues and speeds resolution for customers.

You’ll also save time and make better choices about where to focus your resources through segmentation. For example, you can prioritize high-value or loyal customers and offer them personalized recommendations or incentives, or assign dedicated agents or teams to them.

With this integrated approach to customer experience, your support team can improve its communication with customers. Plus, they can collaborate more effectively with colleagues across channels and teams.

Seamless Communication in Banking

Knowing where customers are on their current journey and why they’re calling has long  empowered traditional banking contact center agents. In contrast, wealth managers and brick-and-mortar branch bankers achieve their goals using insights into the macro-level journeys that reveal long-term growth opportunities for very specific customer profiles.

Today, these roles are overlapping and all customer-facing roles need to use the same data analytics to drive success, especially for predictive engagement. Experience orchestration answers this need with an approach that integrates departmental silos and unifies communications across all channels of engagement.

For example, a customer who has just opened a retirement account can trigger an offer for a free checking or savings account — if they don’t have one already — and other relevant offers based on demographic data that’s shared across departments.

Real-Time Offers in the Hospitality Industry

As the application of AI increases in hotel marketing, it enables hotels to interact with guests in real time using machine learning to personalize recommendations and offers, wherever customers are in their journeys. This could be as they’re searching for transportation to a destination, where they’ll stay and what they’ll do — or upon arrival.

Using an experience orchestration strategy, AI can identify and target the most effective influencers for hotel campaigns, and assist hotels in monitoring social media platforms and identifying customer feedback, sentiment and brand mentions. In this way, hotels can respond promptly and improve the guest experience.

AI can also automate and optimize digital campaigns by identifying the most effective channels, audiences and times to advertise. The hotel increases revenue as it reduces costs through more effective use of its advertising budget.

Predictive Maintenance in the Automotive Sector

As automotive technology advances, traditional fault detection and control methods aren’t enough to ensure the smooth operation of vehicles. Modern sensors, instruments and cameras generate a wealth of data that can be used to improve the customer experience.

With experience orchestration, automotive dealers can capture this data and integrate it with past service records — using AI to predict maintenance needs. Car owners can be notified and plan ahead for service that will improve or extend vehicle performance.

Proactive communication makes it easy for them to maintain their car, improving their satisfaction and personal connection with dealers, for example. It also helps the business prepare for the resources and parts needed for service.

Managing Healthcare Patient Journeys

For healthcare providers, customer effort scores (CES) are an important component of measuring customer satisfaction. Understanding why CES might vary across points of engagement enables teams to take action, if needed, to provide a seamless customer experience.

Let’s look at a real-world example of journey analytics in action. A health insurance company discovered high CES  for newly enrolled members trying to set up automated premium payments. To get to the root of the problem, they used customer journey analytics to examine the journeys for customers who set up automated payments via the website, mobile app and call center. Their analytics showed that 21% of members who set up payments in the mobile app encountered an issue that led to a service call, increasing their CES. But members who began payment setup over the phone or through the website were more successful and reported a lower CES.

With this insight, their customer experience team prioritized a project to improve the user experience of the mobile app. In the meantime, the team can steer newly enrolled members into lower effort journeys to improve their experiences.

Building Lifelong Customer Loyalty

Customers have almost limitless purchasing options today. Differentiating your brand with consistently positive customer experiences can make the difference between a one-time purchase and a lifelong customer relationship.

When customers are happy, they purchase more of your products, they return frequently and they share their positive experiences with others. Using an experience orchestration approach, you can ensure they’re getting the experience they want and expect, every time they visit.

Find out how AI-powered experience orchestration can help your business improve customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty.