In a choir, every singer uses the same hymn sheet. Otherwise, the whole choir sounds out of tune. Similarly, delivering a great customer experience relies on being in tune across the collective effort — or the entire customer experience is off-key.

In August, Genesys and Adobe announced a partnership to deepen your understanding of customer relationships. Together, we’re harmonizing data to create a single view of customer behavior and communications across marketing and contact center operations. This technology integration serves our mutual customers with use cases anchored in three areas:

  1. Increase conversion rates
  2. Prevent churn
  3. Improve operational efficiencies

These are underpinned by delivering a great customer experience to the right prospects and customers for the business — using data and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify where to focus your energy and resources.

Addressing an Out-of-Tune Customer Experience

As digital engagement drives demand for a more personalized customer experience, it also reveals problems in execution. The alliance between Genesys and Adobe focuses on solving these key execution issues caused by:

  • Lack of consistent experiences across marketing and contact center touchpoints
  • No integration between channels, applications and processes in the customer journey
  • An inability to consolidate, assess and act on customer data, resulting in incomplete views of the customer journey and poor prioritization of customer experience issues

The Challenges

Let’s look at some key issues through the lens of three different personas.

The Customer Persona

Email overload: At some point, you’ve probably visited a website to retrieve a phone number for a brand. Unfortunately, that often triggers a retargeting campaign that includes unwanted emails, social media posts and display advertising.

Clueless agents: When you receive an email from a business and you open the email, the offer might sound good. You visit the website for more information, but can’t find any. That’s the first problem. So, you phone the contact center and the agent has no clue about the special offer mentioned in the email.

No special treatment: When you’re a loyal customer who owns multiple products from a brand, you expect to be treated well when you need assistance. For example, you might have a problem with a product and you try to troubleshoot on the website — without success. Ideally, you’d be connected with an agent on chat instantly. Or not. This forces you to call the contact center. Businesses that send you down this path might also leave you on hold for too long. And when you finally speak to an agent, you might have spent what feels like an eternity bringing the agent up to speed with what products you have — and your issue. This doesn’t feel special at all.

The Marketer Persona

Getting feedback: When you build marketing campaigns, the only way to improve upon them is with feedback. But the lack of feedback from the contact center regarding marketing campaign performance often frustrates teams.

Gaps in the customer funnel touchpoint: The contact center has multiple touchpoints. Evaluating the role of these touchpoints in the sales journey funnel is key in identifying opportunities for optimization, as well as issues with the online conversion journey.

The Contact Center Admin Persona

No segmentation feeds: It’s difficult for agents to cross-sell and up-sell without segmentation feeds. If you don’t know when customers have been targeted for campaigns, there’s no way to prepare for deeper engagement. And personalization is difficult when an agent has no context of the customer value to the business.

Attribution: Unless the contact center converted a sale directly, it’s omitted from attribution modeling. Contact centers often don’t get credit for conversions fulfilled online — or at point of sale after initial interactions with the contact center.

Prioritizing customer experiences: High-value customers who make large purchases, or those who’ve been long-term customers, expect to be rewarded with superior customer service. But if it’s difficult to prioritize their experiences, loyalty can be lost. The same is true for customers with a high propensity to churn. Rectifying a bad customer experience directly impacts revenue.

Gartner Research found that 50% of large organizations will have failed to unify engagement, resulting in the continuation of a disjointed and siloed customer experience that lacks context. And context is what resolves central issues for customers, marketers, and admins.

Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and Contact Center Operations

Having a good working relationship between customer operations and marketing is crucial for solving these issues. Customers have more channel options than ever before for communicating with brands, adding touchpoints and thereby, increasing complexity. So, unless there’s a data flow that gives both departments a real-time view into customer behavior and issues, it’s impossible to deliver a coherent and consistent customer experience.

Using the Genesys CloudTM platform, customer conversations take place across inbound and outbound calls, email, web messaging, social media, SMS, and bots. Historically, these conversations — and corresponding reports — have been operationally oriented and haven’t synced with the overall view of the customer.

The breadth of Adobe capabilities for marketing, analytics, advertising, and commerce maximize the efficiency of consolidation on its customer data platform through Adobe Experience Platform. And with Genesys omnichannel integration, it minimizes the number of integration points.

Combining the rich customer data across both platforms unifies customer profiles. That enables deeper insights to orchestrate a true personalized experience across the contact center, digital, and marketing touchpoints.

Data Pipelines United

Together, the Genesys Cloud platform and Adobe Experience Cloud deliver bi-directional data flows that can synchronize the customer experience between marketing and contact center operations.

Unifying context for the agent. The contact center has the richest form of qualitative and quantitative customer data. Unlike marketing, your customers are a captive audience — they’ve opted in for a one-to-one conversation with an agent. When this engagement addresses a problem, it’s an opportunity for the agent to become that customer’s hero. It’s also an opportunity for you to nurture and strengthen the customer relationship.

Streaming key information, such as customer lifetime value score, product plans or recommendations to agents’ desktops, allows teams to work smarter. They have key contextual customer information so they can deal with queries efficiently, reducing average handle times, and increasing the first-contact resolution.

Richer insights to refine strategy. Genesys can stream rich conversational and interaction data in real-time into Adobe, attaching it to the Adobe customer profile. You can link journey session data from Genesys Predictive Engagement, including AI outcome scoring predictions and segments, to individual customer profiles. Using Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, all this data can be united to enable detailed cross-channel attribution — without the need for a data science team.

Segmentation on steroids. Adobe Experience Platform dissects the consolidated customer data and identifies the optimal segments to target — whether it’s for churn-prevention campaigns or to categorize the high-prospect customers to stream to Genesys Predictive Engagement. Identifying customers on the website in real-time, when they call the contact center or reach out on social media, lets you prioritize within queues or determine cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

Finding Harmony

The Genesys and Adobe alliance simplifies the complexity of stitching together a fragmented martech stack. With contact center operations consolidated on one platform — Genesys Cloud — and marketing operations on Adobe, you can deliver great customer experiences fast and efficiently.