A customer’s journey with a brand rarely starts with a phone call for more information. Typically, a customer sees an ad, follows your company on social media or maybe has even purchased something from you already. By the time a consumer is on the phone with you, you should already know a lot of background about their journey.

Connecting customers with the right call center agent is crucial to delivering a great experience. But it’s only one piece of the customer experience (CX) puzzle. It’s no longer just about quick customer resolutions for one-off engagements; it’s about orchestrating the entirety of these experiences.

Orchestration goes a step further by managing the series of conversations and customer journeys, which make up their overall relationship with a company.

When a customer reaches out to a brand — either by phone, web or other digital means — a CX platform routes the request to an automated system, a self-service bot or a live agent. However, what’s missing is the ability to empower agents, or the system, with the full context of that customer’s journey. This could be from the brand’s own system, such as a previous purchase or return, or externally, such as an online search or response to an ad.

The lack of context provided to resolve these individual experiences is often what contributes to a negative customer experience.

Orchestration Is at the Heart of Great Customer Experience

When we think about orchestrating an experience, brands pull relevant information from different systems to carry context. This can be integrated across all customer interactions to make it relevant, personal and even proactive.

From a consumer standpoint, powerful orchestration builds connected, seamless experiences by layering the right data and knowledge on top of every interaction. Integrating data — regardless of the consumer touchpoints — and using it to orchestrate every contact is key to delivering a connected customer experience.

In this context, orchestration is being able to manage interactions across all channels and doing this in long-running sessions. And with the right integrations, journey orchestration can proactively respond to changes in the customer or company data.

For example, this could include things like an order, a change in inventory, the availability of specific services, cancellations, and social media “likes,” to name a few.

What impact can orchestration deliver in the real world? Here are a few examples across industries.

Retail: Orchestration can deliver proactive notifications about offers and other customer communications — no matter where they are in their purchase cycle. For example, when a change in inventory happens in the middle of an online shopping transaction, a simple pop-up could notify the customer about low stock to expedite their order process.

Companies can also send a special discount offer to a customer’s preferred contact channel to nudge a sale for an abandoned shopping cart.

Healthcare: Automatic reminders can be sent for upcoming appointments, to schedule a follow-up visit, or when prescription refills are due. Additionally, with the right connected data, orchestration could take it step further.

It could look at new prescriptions that are generated and match them against any other medications within a profile to notify consumers or the prescribers of potential adverse reactions.

Financial services: Orchestration provides the ability to truly personalize banking sessions, including consolidating information across different financial product portfolios or offering services based on account status. It could also mean coordinating services across different lines of businesses (bank, credit cards, loans, etc.).

Based on the system’s understanding of a customer’s spending behavior, orchestration can also deliver proactive fraud alerts and expedited service on card replacements.

Travel: Service interruptions have become commonplace for the travel industry since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Orchestration offers the ability to proactively notify customers about delays, disruptions or when services resume.

Offer management and discounting capabilities let businesses attract customers based on sudden availability, offer upgrades based on loyalty status, or provide automatic rebooking for delays or cancellations.

Creating That Customer Satisfaction Connection

Bringing together human interaction and technology — and harnessing connected data — is at the heart of delivering empathetic customer experiences. Powerful experience orchestration allows brands to deliver consistent service while adding context. And that allows you to provide the right level of empathy and emotional connection in every interaction with your brand.

Real human impact begins by reframing business imperatives through a lens of empathy, where customers are always remembered, heard and understood, on any channel — voice, digital and chat.

At Genesys, we believe in Super Human Service for all industries, for the benefit of our customers and their customers.

 

A version of this blog was originally published on Forbes.