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End-to-End Customer Journey Orchestration Drives CX of the Future

It’s no surprise that customer expectations have risen—from interacting with a customer service agent to the ability to self-serve or receive proactive communication about relevant services or solutions. Customers want to interact with businesses on channels they most commonly use that allow quick actions, two-way interaction, and fulfill their needs in a matter of minutes. Additionally, recent research from imimobile shows that customers increasingly prefer to self-serve for tasks like updating personal details or booking appointments without having to call into a contact center or complete lengthy online forms.
 
The stakes to deliver an exceptional customer experience (CX) have never been higher. Businesses must find another gear to not only meet customer expectations but stay ahead of the curve to retain customers and win their loyalty. In a recent CCW Digital webinar, our company discussed a few challenges, potential solutions, and the vision for CX in 2022 and beyond.
 
Major CX challenges businesses face
When offering their services on digital platforms and messaging channels, most businesses, especially large enterprises, face significant challenges. For example, inflexible legacy systems, disconnected applications that store data, and lack of valuable resources slow down their pace of change to meet or exceed customer expectations.
 
The wide variety of communication channels to choose from, identifying the best ones to communicate with customers, and the lack of a centralized view of all communications across these channels have confused organizations about what to prioritize and when. Businesses must ensure a frictionless, connected experience across multiple channels to keep their customers engaged and feeling valued for doing business with them.
 
Enhance CX with end-to-end orchestration
Now more than ever, CX must become a common goal across functions that influence CX like marketing, IT & Operations, and contact centers to converge and build a cohesive experience and not isolated customer interactions.
 
Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) is a technology that helps enterprises bring together various customer journeys on a centralized platform to orchestrate and automate them from end-to-end across multiple touchpoints.
 
Imagine an interaction with an online grocery store. The store sends proactive alerts of discounts, offers, and restocked goods to your preferred channel, prompting you to visit their mobile application, place an order, pay using an integrated mobile wallet, and finally schedule delivery as per your convenience. The journey then shifts from the mobile application to another channel, say SMS, for instance, where you receive alerts about the goods being packed and sent to your doorstep. With a simple reply, you can confirm your availability, request another delivery slot, and even suggest a safe drop-off point. The store then confirms the revised delivery slot, and you receive your goods when you want them.
 
That’s an example of a carefully orchestrated end-to-end customer journey leveraging automation to communicate relevant information, transition across various channels without the loss of context, and seamlessly perform fulfillment, keeping customer convenience and preferences at the core of the entire journey. Customers today expect this level of engagement from businesses of all industries, across all channels, at all times.
 
CX of the future—2022 and beyond
The future of customer experience is customer-centric and consistent. Businesses must tie multiple customer journeys together with the right technology and stakeholders who can leverage customer data to design and deliver relevant and personalized customer journeys.
 
It’s not just about the technology—customer journey design also needs to consider the human and emotional aspects that make good experiences so organizations can build an empathetic connection with their customers. Therefore, intelligent customer experiences will become the norm. We can expect enterprises to leverage technologies like natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), and AI to identify customer intent, extract context, and customer sentiment to further customize the journeys to suit customer preferences.
 
Enterprise CPaaS that caters to large enterprises’ needs will become critical for orchestrating and automating end-to-end customer journeys and delivering frictionless CX. IT teams and developers can design and deploy intelligent customer journeys using APIs, SDKs, low-code tools with embedded NLP and AI capabilities. They can also provide the business with a centralized view of all customer interactions to monitor, evaluate, and enhance these journeys.
 
CX of the future, therefore, is a blend of technology and human empathy. Watch our video here to learn more about this blended approach.