Orchestration solutions connect customer data and place it within the context of the customer journey, paving the way for real-time, personalized experiences.
Yet, they now go much further. For instance, they monitor numerous CX metrics, allowing companies to track the impact of customer journey alterations.
In addition, the solutions filter relevant customer journey insights to the best-placed stakeholders and leverage predictive analytics to trigger the "next best experience" in real-time.
However, these solutions have grown new arms and legs since the leading vendors made high-profile acquisitions – including CSG's takeover of Kitewheel and Medallia's roll-up of Thunderhead.
As such, CX Today contacted five experts in the customer journey orchestration space and invited them to participate in a roundtable. These include:
- Bob Hale, CEO of Alterian
- Mark Smith, SVP of Customer Experience at CSG
- Bill Staikos, SVP & Executive Advisor at Medallia
- Michele Carlson, Senior Product Marketing Manager at NICE / Alexandria Doucet, Quality Analytics Manager at ONE
- Brett Weigl, SVP and GM of Digital, AI, and Journey Orchestration at Genesys
Below, each participant responds to a set of questions, sharing their business’s most differentiative platform features, end-user success stories, and market predictions.
Customer Journey Orchestration: The New Features
To uncover the most cutting-edge capabilities entering the customer journey orchestration space, we asked our experts: which feature most differentiates your solution?
Here’s what they had to say.
AI-Driven Customer Journey Analytics
Hale: At the heart of Alterian's Real-Time CX Platform is advanced customer journey analytics.
The analytics identifies friction points and drop-offs across channels. With this insight, businesses can craft strategies that address customer needs and preferences.
Powering this is a feature that culminates insights gathered from billions of customer interactions.
Yet, it's not just about reacting to customer behaviors; it's about predicting their next move and offering them the next-best experience tailored to their needs.
Such real-time personalization ensures that each customer's journey is unique, enabling them to achieve their goals with ease and satisfaction.
Best Practice Journeys
Smith: CSG provides a library of best practice journeys to help clients get started, embedding AI in its solutions to allow clients to keep innovating.
It also helps clients collect and organize all their data to support the journeys, provides extensive analytics to guide what journeys to create, and delivers real-time communications triggered by journey rules.
Finally, CSG Xponent's Journey Orchestration solution is agnostic to all the other systems, channels, and data. As such, no rip-and-replace is necessary, which is critical as formerly manageable tech stacks turn into tech mountains.
Data Consolidation
Staikos: Medallia connects and activates structured, unstructured, clickstream data, quant/qualitative, sentiment, voice of the customer (VoC), voice of the employee (VoE), and transactional data types. That transactional data helps understand customer intent and drive relevant, real-time automated omnichannel actions across all journey stages.
An excellent solution here is same-session re-decisioning, which ensures the continuity of knowledge in the moment and across channels by focusing on a customer's fluid intent.
Yet, back to data consolidation, an organization may leverage the customer journey orchestration platform to analyze journeys and customer data through interactive dashboards. Moreover, they may use drillable journey visualization tools to identify key moments and interaction topics.
Medallia delivers these insights to the correct role within the business to have the greatest impact, providing the right action at the most opportune time.
Conversational Intelligence
Carlson: NICE's purpose-built AI underpins its conversation-centric cloud platform and is the biggest differentiator in customer journey orchestration.
Its Enlighten AI records and analyzes every customer interaction, delivering rich, actionable insights that CX organizations can use to optimize customer journeys.
Indeed, Enlighten connects the dots for organizations without spending extra time on data analysis. It identifies automation opportunities, enables targeted employee coaching, and optimizes organizations' knowledge management systems so employees instantly get the answers they need.
Doing so eliminates the friction in customer journeys, making every interaction seamless and effortless.
Real-Time Interaction Data
Weigl: The Genesys Cloud CX platform empowers companies with real-time access to interactions and data so they better orchestrate customer and employee journeys.
To do so, the platform leverages AI and journey data from every channel, source, or system, creating a more personalized interaction based on each customer’s objectives and preferences.
The platform also enables continuous business process optimization and offers an omnichannel suite and advanced journey analytics that go beyond basic journey mapping.
Finally, Genesys Cloud CX surfaces insights with path discovery, intelligent alerts, and root cause analysis to help facilitate real-time CX optimization, leading to increased efficiency, savings, revenue, and customer loyalty.
Customer Journey Orchestration: The Examples
To unearth how businesses successfully leverage customer journey orchestration platforms, we asked participants to share a successful story of a brand that implemented their solution.
Here’s what they had to say.
A US Utilities Company Cuts Costs, Increases CSAT
Hale: A US utilities company identified a business opportunity within their existing customer journey experience to improve the overall customer experience while cutting costs.
By utilizing the power of Alterian’s Real-Time CX platform, they:
- "Dramatically" reduced call volumes
- Empowered more customers to use the already available self-service tools
- Increased customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores and customer lifetime value (CLV)
A US Grocery Giant Creates an "Air Traffic Control" System
Smith: A U.S. grocery giant to serve as an "air traffic control" system for their emails, as they struggled with email engagement.
Using CSG Xponent Customer Journey Management, the brand could identify which email(s) customers should receive, determine if they’d been overcommunicated with that day or week, and analyze the results of email sends to optimize more for the future.
From there, the grocery business could orchestrate, based on that data, to send the right message at the right time to the right person.
With CSG's help, the grocer has created a more engaged and activated buyer base through email loyalty – with fewer, better-targeted emails.
Indeed, with CSG's help and real-time decisioning (100 million decisions per day), the brand reduced email volumes by 40 percent and added $2-3 million in monthly revenue.
Bosch Siemens Home Appliance Pinpoints & Addresses Journey Pain Points
Staikos: Medallia partnered with Bosch Siemens Home Appliance (BSH) to identify where and why consumers abandon their journeys.
In doing so, BSH will track more than 100 different experiences and over 2,000 activities.
Informed by this intelligence, BSH detects the most common journey drop-off points, clusters consumers to understand the reason or root cause of those drop-offs, and calculates the probability of return for each customer.
Armed with this understanding of customer experiences, the company took a hard look at its website to better comprehend every customer's engagement level and personalize it accordingly.
