Customer Experience Orchestration Makes or Breaks Your CX

What is a Customer Experience Orchestration?

In short, Customer Experience orchestration is everything that goes into creating the customer’s journey through your organization. Every touchpoint, every path, every outcome; you need a complete picture of the customer experience.

Customer Experience orchestration, then, is an intimidating job. The bigger the organization, the bigger the challenge. Let’s put that scale into perspective:

• First, you have your basic customer journeys. Making a purchase, getting and updating information, making a complaint, etc. These are things that all businesses need to do, and each should have a defined customer journey map.

• Then, you have product-specific journeys. These will vary according to sector and size. The more services your company offers (insurance, financial services, etc.), the more different customer journeys your organization will have. Banks are very good at this: mobile apps serve most basic functions, but dedicated contact centers serve more complex inquiries.

• After that, you have regional journeys. Language is a challenge, but adapting your business to a different region is not as simple as whacking it into Google Translate. You need to account for time differences, service availability (can your network provide coverage in the new region), and disruptions around the world that you might not be aware of at home.

For bigger organizations, you’ll need a whole team of customer experience professionals to manage every aspect of your service. Outstanding customer experience orchestration depends on this team and the tools you equip them with.

The Tools Behind Customer Experience Orchestration

To manage a problem as complex as customer experience orchestration, you need some seriously powerful tools. You need ways of measuring, mapping, and making changes on the fly. You need tools that make your team more flexible, rather than making processes harder. That means they have to be intuitive, easy to use, and accessible.

Of these tools, a few are absolutely essential:

• A single, browser-based interface will give you complete access to your customer experience orchestration. There’s nothing more frustrating than having to tab through different apps mid-workflow, or having to install yet another piece of software to access essential functions. You need to be able to access your entire CX ecosystem from within a single interface, and from any location.

• Comprehensive reporting is a must. Without insight, you can’t tell what is and isn’t working. You need to see an overview of your whole CX estate, whilst also drilling down into agent performance at the individual level.

• Probably the most important tool is your service designer. Put simply, the more accessible your service designer, the easier your customer experience orchestration is going to be. If your service designer is primarily code-based, and you need a whole development team to make the slightest change, you’re going to have a bad time.

The success of your customer experience orchestration depends on your service designer. So what does a powerful service designer look like?

Perfecting Customer Experience Orchestration with the Right Service Designer

As mentioned, the ideal service designer for customer experience orchestration is intuitive. It leverages a no-code interface to make customer journeys easy to visualize and plan. Once the basics are clear, building for complexity becomes easy. It’s also cheaper; you need to hire expert talent just to make everyday changes. Your CX experts can do it themselves.

And that’s not all a good service designer should do:

• Integrating with third-party systems should be easily handled through your service designer. API integrations should be visible and editable from within the interface, letting you push and pull data during interactions.

• Likewise, AI functionality should also be accessible from within the service designer. From fully automated chatbots to intelligent routing, setting up AI interactions should be as easy as routing to an agent.

• Support for intelligent routing is a must-have. That requires a service designer simple enough to manage complexity. And that means an interface intuitive enough to learn quickly, and accessible to everyone, even those with visual impairments.

• When you make changes, you shouldn’t have to wait days to see them live. Your service designer should be supported by a cloud platform that allows for immediate roll-out of updates, with no downtime required.

The service designer is your point of centralized control. The more flexible it is, the more powerful you’re going to be. But in large organizations, concentrating all that power in one place isn’t always wise. When changes need to be made in other regions, you need to empower people on the ground to make them.

Pushing Power to the Edge for Customer Experience Orchestration

Large, multi-national organizations draw on talent from around the world to manage their services in every region they cover. What’s the point of all that talent, if every change request is bottle-necked by a group of central service administrators? You need to give regional managers and supervisors the ability to make changes on the fly to adapt to local conditions, to perfect your customer experience orchestration.

• As established, every customer journey is different. Those differences can depend on vertical factors, such as intent, or horizontal factors, such as location or language. Different regions will have different network setups, different regulations, different languages, and will encounter challenges. Trying to manage all of that complexity centrally is going to be an overwhelming challenge.

• If regional supervisors want to make service changes, they shouldn’t have to wait for administrators on the other side of the world to come online before they can get approval. In a fast-moving situation, you can’t afford to waste time on bureaucracy.

• The solution is democratization; giving regional supervisors the power to make limited changes in order to adapt customer journeys in real time. Only by empowering your talent on the ground can you orchestrate customer journeys effectively at a global level.  

Successful customer experience orchestration is heavily tech dependent. Effective customer experience orchestration depends on an accessible, flexible, and intuitive solution that allows power to be devolved within your organization.