What Is Experience Orchestration

November 19, 2024

• What Is Experience Orchestration?
• Benefits of Experience Orchestration
• Four Key Elements of Experience Orchestration
• What's the Difference Between Experience Orchestration and Journey Orchestration?
  • A real-time decisioning engine
• CSG Xponent: Your Engine for Ideal Customer Outcomes
• Learn more about CSG Xponent

Disconnected, impersonal experiences jeopardize customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Picture this: When you schedule an appointment to fix an internet outage, you're given a four-hour window. Not wanting to wait around all morning, you request that the technician call you 20 minutes before arriving, as you might be out walking your dog. However, the customer service department fails to relay your request to the field services team, so the technician doesn't get the message. As a result, you're not home when the technician arrives, so you must reschedule your appointment.

This disconnect between customer service and field services negatively impacts the customer experience. A Deloitte survey of 1000 U.S. consumers found that 84%of respondents believe it is very or extremely important for brands to provide consistent, positive interactions across touchpoints.

To deliver consistently positive experiences that meet customer expectations, companies must implement experience orchestration.

What Is Experience Orchestration?

Consistent experiences with a brand are necessary-but not sufficient-to satisfy customers. Today's customers expect connected experiences across touchpoints and departments, spanning days and overlapping journeys. In fact, a survey of 484 global CX leadersrevealed that 57% of respondents believe customers expect departments to be seamlessly integrated for quick resolution and support. This is why experience orchestration is crucial.

According to Deloitte, experience orchestration refers to "using strategy, data and technology to drive consistent, personalized and connected interactions across all customer touch points. In real-world terms, it's about ensuring that everything a brand learns about a customer is 'passed on' and used to inform and elevate that customer's next experience with the brand, no matter the channel or stage of the journey." Experience orchestration reduces friction along the customer's own self-directed journey, instead of pushing the customer through a predesigned funnel.

Benefits of Experience Orchestration

Provide personalized experiences that build customer loyalty. Consumers choose and stay loyal to brands that anticipate their wants and needs and interact with them as individuals, not demographics. Most (80%) consumers expect businesses to understand their needs, interests, and preferences. Almost 80%of consumers say they're more likely to purchase from a brand that personalizes experiences-and they spend about 50% more with those brands. Experience orchestration delivers the tailored experience customers crave, giving each one what they need, when they need it, without hassle.

Share information across teams to improve the customer experience. Businesses collect vast quantities of customer data, but that data isn't useful if employees can't access it. Experience orchestration breaks down data silos, sharing customer information from different systems and previous interactions with sales, marketing, customer service, billing, field service and other departments. Well-informed employees are better equipped to provide support that meets each customer's individual needs. For example, when the field services department sees the customer's request to be notified when the technician is en route, the technician calls the customer at the right time. The customer doesn't have to stay home for four hours, not knowing when the tech will show up.

Deliver proactive support. Sharing a customer's recent interactions or browsing history with the call center agent helps the agent identify and quickly meet customer needs. For example, if the customer (who currently has an Android phone) is looking at the new iPhone, the agent can be prepared to explain the benefits of each phone-and the differences between them.

Four Key Elements of Experience Orchestration

Connected customer data. Unifying data from different departments and systems helps you understand customer behaviors, preferences and needs. Analytics measures interactions with your brand, across every channel the customer uses. Knowing what happens as customers interact with your brand helps you improve processes.

Touchpoint management: Experience orchestration requires seamless omni-channel integration of customer touchpoints. Whether a customer engages in-store or through your website, social media, mobile app, or contact center, the experience should be consistent and connected across channels.

Personalized communication. Experience orchestration tailors content and messages to each customer, recommending relevant products and services based on browsing, purchase and usage history. For example, take a customer who frequently exceeds the data allowance on their mobile plan due to streaming videos on their phone. They might receive an offer for a bundle that includes unlimited data and a streaming service subscription.

Feedback loops. Improving CX is an ongoing process, not a one-and-done effort. Stay connected with customers by continuously gathering and analyzing customer feedback and proactively addressing customer concerns.

What's the Difference Between Experience Orchestration and Journey Orchestration?

Experience orchestration and journey orchestration are often used interchangeably, but they represent slightly different approaches to designing and managing customer interactions.

In essence, experience orchestration is about creating a positive customer experience, while journey orchestration is about guiding customers through a desired journey using real-time decisioning. A decisioning engine analyzes customer interactions in real time, identifying intent and determining the next best action to take and when for each customer, in the context of everything known about the customer up to that point.

A real-time decisioning engine

• Identifies customer needs and predicts customer behavior
• Determines context and adapts the next best action as situations and behaviors shift

Journey orchestration acts like an air traffic controller for all communications, preventing communication chaosby dynamically adjusting communication based on individual customer behavior and/or real time signals. Journey orchestration prioritizes or suppresses messages for individual customers based on factors like recent interactions, marketing campaigns, preferences or real-time signals to prevent sending conflicting communications. For example, the system wouldn't send a "renew your contract" message to a customer who is in the middle of a service journey contesting a wireless bill. Someone who is complaining about a billing error won't be eager to sign up for another year of mobile service.

Here's how the two systems would treat a customer who recently purchased a laptop online.

Experience orchestration:

• Recommend related products (such as Microsoft 365, extended warranty, or system support services), based on browsing history
• Inform customer of delivery time and successful delivery
• Send a customer feedback survey

Journey orchestration:

• Nudge customer to complete the purchase (if the shopping cart was abandoned)
• Recommend related products
• Notify customer regarding delivery day/time, delays and successful delivery
• Provide a video with instructions for installing Microsoft 365
• Send a customer feedback survey

CSG Xponent: Your Engine for Ideal Customer Outcomes

CSG Xponentis an intelligent customer experience platform that uses real-time, unified data to personalize every touchpoint at an individual level. Xponent coordinates communication across departments and channels,anticipating customers' needs and delivering the right message, at the right time, in the right channel. Powered by a decisioning engine, Xponent leverages journey analyticsto adjust customer journeys in the moment, improving engagement and satisfaction.

Learn more about CSG Xponent

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