Organizations are under immense pressure to boost the customer experience and employee experiences — all while improving business outcomes. Consumer expectations continue to rise; consumers now have less patience for subpar experiences. Acting in real time is essential to meet baseline expectations for today’s consumers.

Because most companies are organized in traditional functional departments like sales, marketing, product and customer service, it can be challenging to understand customer experiences that are enabled by multiple functions. Channel and data silos are natural by products of a traditional organizational structure.

To provide excellent service, your customer support teams need access to the latest information during the interaction. This enables them to resolve problems quickly – and with empathy. That requires AI-powered tools.

This blog looks at the problems traditional siloed companies face in providing exceptional customer and employee experiences. It also highlights some advances in artificial intelligence (AI) tools, such as next-gen call center analytics tools, and explains how they can enable companies to deliver faster, more personalized services – and ultimately win in the experience economy.

Obstacles of a Siloed Experience

Functional silos create a frustrating experience for both customers and your customer experience teams.

  • It can be difficult to align customer-facing departments, even under a single customer experience leader. This is because each department typically puts their own goals first and then set priorities that way.
  • Employees struggle to provide the frictionless, connected and relevant experience that customers expect on any channel they prefer to engage on — at any given time. They can’t anticipate customer needs, recognize customer preferences or have insight into prior experiences.
  • Rather than just understanding individual interactions, analyzing the entire journey a customer or group of customers takes toward achieving their goals helps organizations gain insight into customer behaviors that were previously invisible.

With AI, customer experience (CX) agents can more quickly understand what customers want and take action. And supervisors and call center managers no longer have to listen live when customers call to understand issues and assist agents.

Virtual agents use AI and natural language understanding to interpret customer needs in real time. These tools can actively listen to detect emotions, surface knowledge or coach the agent in real time. And they can capture and understand nuances and customer sentiments and hand off to human agents, when necessary.

Having this customer journey data on the agent desktop becomes an analytics source for agents. It gives them context to understand what the customer is trying to accomplish, such as searching for a certain product.

This can improve customer experience. And it helps enhance employee engagement, increase agent productivity and improve job satisfaction.

AI works in real time to translate a call or detect intent. Analytics, such as speech and text analytics, surfaces this information. Together, these insights enable companies to personalize customer interactions and stand out from their competitors.

Using Real-Time Analytics to Create Fluent Customer Interactions

Real-time data gives you a snapshot of a specific moment in time. It can be social data or data captured in a business ecosystem. Its value, particularly in customer interactions, is that having data instantly and automatically available to any authorized user — including all business systems and processes — allows you to monitor and visualize it, for example, on dashboards.

Having insights from this massive volume of data can be very valuable to:

  • Inform and support humans during interactions
  • Enhance operational efficiency by reducing repeated interactions
  • Reduce average handle time and the number of transfers required
  • Improve sales conversions
  • Reduce churn by using agent assistants/copilot in real time

The analytics and insights produced through AI algorithms enable the best possible decisions, such as driving smarter and more personalized customer engagements.

By engaging in fluent conversations with customers and capturing their intent, Virtual agents play an important role in understanding customer needs and demands. The customer data captured in the conversation can be shared across the business for different purposes. It can be used for self-service, routing, predictive analytics, reporting and other agent interactions. The business can also use that information to proactively deliver preferred services.

 

A company is only as good as its service, say 86% of consumers surveyed globally in a Genesys report on customer experience. And one-third of those surveyed switched brands after a bad experience in the past year.
 – The State of Customer Experience, Genesys, 2024

 

What It Means to Orchestrate Better Customer Journeys

Journey orchestration goes way beyond traditional methods of personalization. It focuses on orchestrating better and more seamless journeys. And by leveraging customer journey management, you can gain a full view of customer behavior, including insights into previous interactions, across every channel. This enables you to gain visibility into where your customers are experiencing issues, such as being unable to transfer money, pay a bill or schedule an appointment, and uncover trends in customer behavior. With these insights, teams can make informed data-driven decisions and implement continuous improvements to enhance quality assurance and help customers achieve their goals.

Modern customer journey orchestration allows lines of business, including customer service, marketing and operations leaders, to get on top of potential customer issues or challenges to address them before there’s a bigger problem. As a result, every interaction becomes highly personalized because it’s based on each customer’s objectives, preferences and history. It’s a more strategic perspective on the customer and employee experience because it streamlines journeys and can improve overall business outcomes.

With access to a full range of data, companies can analyze customer segments and buyer personas. And businesses can  provide value that truly addresses customer needs in the moment.

Focus on Results with Real-Time Data and Analytics

When you begin exploring use cases for real-time data and analytics, start with the results you want to achieve. Be sure to identify how these will help customers, employees and your business. Here are several ways AI can impact your contact center.

Identify Clear Patterns with Contact Center AI Routing

Real-time data lets you move beyond static routing rules and embrace dynamic routing  strategies. Predictive routing, also known as AI routing or automated routing, represents a paradigm shift from using other, more limited and manually configured routing methods.

AI routing systems can identify clear patterns in complex interaction data. And they’re constantly learning. This means your system can spot patterns that will lead to the best customer-to-agent matches.

As engagement patterns change, the AI adapts to find the new ideal outcomes, with minimal human input needed. All these changes can be based on KPIs you choose, such as calibrating your system to optimize routing for metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT), seasonal sales targets and others.

With AI tools driving your routing strategy, you can automatically direct incoming interactions to the appropriate agents or resources. This saves agents time and makes it easier for customers to reach a resolution.

Get Actionable Insights with Customer Journey Analytics

Consumers use countless digital channels to reach out to companies. And they expect simplicity and speed from customer service interactions. According to the Genesys report “Generational dynamics in the experience economy,” 60% of consumers globally say a seamless transition between different channels (e.g., phone, email, chat) is one of the most important factors for a service interaction.

With modern journey analytics tools that visualize interactions across multiple channels in near-real time, you can drive informed and focused decisions that improve the overall customer journey. And because these tools handle all the complex data aggregation for you, there’s no need to spend time on background work. You can focus on solving issues within customer journeys.

Get an interactive view into the steps customers take to achieve their goals — including both seamless interactions and those that might be causing frustration. By being able to identify issues and take immediate steps to improve journeys, you can enhance overall customer satisfaction. And you can improve contact center agent efficiency and overall call center performance.

Orchestrating the end-to-end customer journey can bridge silos and eliminate obstacles and it enables you to provide fluid, personalized journeys across channels at scale. 

Pinpoint the Drivers of Journey Success and Failure

Understanding what contributes to the success or failure of customer journeys is critical for enhancing experiences and achieving key business outcomes. By mapping and analyzing the customer journey, companies get a step-by-step evaluation of journey conversion. And that can provide valuable insights into customer behavior.

By highlighting where progress stalls or friction happens, you can pinpoint bottlenecks, such as high drop-off rates or repeated escalations. Then companies can take action to resolve them effectively.

Visualization tools also enable teams to monitor journey performance over time. By visualizing key metrics and analyzing trends, patterns and relationships, these tools can uncover areas that need attention. This helps to foster a culture of continuous improvement, ensuring customer journeys evolve to meet ever-changing needs and expectations.

This proactive approach transforms raw data into actionable insights, giving businesses a strong foundation for decision-making. By identifying and addressing issues before they escalate, teams can remain agile, optimizing every touchpoint to deliver meaningful value to both customers and the organization.

Unlock AI with a Real-Time Data Strategy

AI creates this world of unprecedented potential for understanding and insight. And it can transform every area of business.

Using the power of AI, real-time data and analytics insights helps solve issues for modern customer-first businesses. It allows them to focus on essential use cases that support business goals. And they can use insights about where their customers are in their journeys — and where they’ve been — to help define what steps to take next.

It’s time to advance from being the type of call center operations that simply serves customers. To stand out in the market, you need to transform into an AI-powered contact center that personalizes CX and enables engagement at the right time and place – with the right information. Watch the on-demand webinar, “Effortless AI: An AI adoption model for customer experience” to get started.