Do you understand all the touchpoints your customers have and/or use to engage with your organization? You’re not seeing the full picture if you only monitor contact center activity. Today’s customers interact with brands in seemingly infinite ways, from viewing ads on social media to reading reviews to visiting stores and engaging in online communities. Leading organizations expertly manage all these customer interactions and orchestrate service journeys to identify opportunities for improvement.

What does customer journey orchestration mean?

Customer journey orchestration is the process of leveraging customer data from every channel, source, or system to understand a customer’s entire experience with an organization as opposed to individual interactions. This creates a more complete understanding of each customer to make every moment of engagement highly personalized based on their prior experience. This deep dive into activity across all touchpoints also helps companies work faster to improve at every step. Here’s a hypothetical example of customer journey orchestration: While monitoring the journey across one of its key offerings, an insurance provider noticed that interaction costs were increasing while self-service percentages were decreasing. Empowered by this insight, the company’s CX team was able to investigate and discover that its First Contact Resolution rate had fallen significantly, increasing call volume and costs for this journey. Further investigation found that the likelihood of a customer calling an agent would be much higher if they were trying to access their online portal using a non-Chrome web browser. The CX team notified IT to resolve the issue and worked with marketing to proactively communicate with impacted customers, producing a win-win scenario.

Why is customer journey orchestration important?

Customers no longer simply pick up the phone, ask a question, and hang up. They engage with organizations in every feasible way, so much so that Gartner recently coined the term “The Everything Customer”: a modern consumer who wants to access and engage brands through their tech in one seamless swoop. No friction, no fragmentation, and no hassle. Companies are paying close attention. United Airlines allows passengers 10 ways to digitally interact, including smart speakers, and Domino’s lets its customers order pizza from their smart TV. Even if you don’t offer service via “fancy” mediums like smartwatches and smart TVs, your customers use more than just phone for engagement – including touchpoints outside your company’s purview – that must be managed and mapped out to better understand and improve their overall brand experience. The bottom line is that customers don’t just have service interactions; they’re journeying, and this journey never ends.

How do organizations tangibly benefit?

McKinsey reports that measuring satisfaction on customer journeys is 30% more predictive of overall customer satisfaction (CSAT) than measuring happiness for each individual interaction. Maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys also has the potential not only to increase CSAT by as much as 20% but increase revenue by up to 15% while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20%. Here are three specific ways organizations tangibly benefit from customer journey orchestration:

• Anticipate your customers’ needs and proactively engage based on a complete picture of their buying journey (70% of customers globally say they have a more favorable view of brands that engage via proactive notifications). Application-to-person messaging platforms facilitate this proactiveness.
• Match customers with the best resource within your organization (not just the next available agent) using business rules, context, and desired outcomes (intelligent skill-based routing is proven to improve FCR and CSAT by 5% to 15%).
• Deliver an effortless experience throughout the entire customer journey, across both voice and digital channels and devices (a.k.a. cater to The Everything Customer).

Where do you get started?

Many companies orchestrate interactions only within the contact center while leading organizations nurture a truly data-driven, technology-enabled ecosystem to capture customer interactions across the entire journey seamlessly. It’s highly likely, however, that these “contact center-specific” organizations have all the applications and systems needed to start orchestrating journeys and getting more intelligence from their data. It’s at this point that a certified technology partner like Servion is perfectly positioned to help bring everything together so you can begin managing your data more effectively, understanding your customers more deeply, and making improvements more immediately. We enable customer journey orchestration for global leaders in healthcare, financial services, and telecom in myriad ways, from application development to offering the industry’s largest ecosystem of specialized technology partners. When you know better, you do better. Servion can help your organization take this critical step in its CX strategy.