Historically, businesses engaged in customer service have implemented new systems to address missing capabilities or to improve efficiency. With the number of overlapping capabilities in the marketplace, that mindset needs to shift toward designing solutions with an eye toward experience orchestration rather than simply adding more systems to address changing business conditions.

As organizations strive to provide seamless and consistent customer experiences across channels, personas, lines of business and geographies, client demand for more streamlined processes, enhanced skill sets and enabling technologies is increasing. These enhancements provide a single view of the customer across channels and enable more consistent experiences with improved agent efficiency.

Channel Engagement Engine

Customers today expect to receive outcomes delivered to them based on their preferences and within the channels of their choice. Access to customer data, interaction history and preferred communication methods including phone, mobile, chat, SMS, web and even Internet of Things devices helps to ensure that agents can view customer activities across channels.

Too many companies treat channels as siloed capabilities, often with different agent pools and work distribution strategies. This has resulted in fragmented experiences from both an agent and customer perspective. Given the evolution of digital and social channels it is understandable that for many companies these capabilities were added one at a time and are now a spider web of systems.

Now is the time to rethink the approach to channel management, especially now that many companies are at the point where first- or second-generation channel solutions require upgrades or replacement. Eventus thinks of this aspect of the service technology as a Channel Engagement Engine. Whatever channels you plan to offer customers, thinking of them in terms of a single engine to control the customer channel experience will result in both a simplified environment and stronger experience orchestration—and it will improve your brand and loyalty.

The Channel Engagement Engine acts as the “traffic conductor” across the ecosystem of technologies. From an agent perspective, these advances provide for a more consistent workday. From a management perspective, it is possible to gauge the health of your servicing organization through one system. Gone are the days of logging in and out of channel systems as inter-day conditions change. In addition, the implementation of Managed Experience Systems ensures agents don’t need to be retrained to service different channels.

Last, and most importantly, companies are able to offer your customers the channel they prefer and adapt your workforce to a changing environment driven by business conditions. Being able to adapt to changes in customer demand in seconds means that you can focus on experience orchestration for your customers, as opposed to staring at staffing screens supporting multiple channels and centers trying to optimize a situation that in many cases will have you making changes based on the situation that happened 30 minutes ago. The future belongs to those companies that nimbly address changes in consumer behavior and the first step in this process is to think of your channels as a Channel Engagement Engine.

Managed Experience System

For most companies, one of the biggest opportunities for change centers to create this experience orchestration comes through new approaches to managing the disparate set of technologies and processes used to complete customer requests. Most companies use five to seven systems to manage transactions, customer interactions, product selection, and financial settlements. The problem is that not only do these systems create a disjointed experience from a company’s perspective, but it also bleeds into the customer experience.

It is not practical for most organizations to fix this issue by replacing all systems, which was often the recommended strategy 10 to 15 years ago. Our approach is to rethink the customer-facing experience through a Managed Experience System. This requires rethinking traditional systems integration projects and approaching the customer experience from a process orientation and look to provide seamless experience orchestration rather than simply stitching together existing or new systems.

From a technology perspective, some organizations may need to change the existing thinking that traditional systems integration provides a seamless customer experience. Yes, integration of complex applications is important but integration does not in and of itself create a unified experience for either customers or agents. Now that integration is becoming more straightforward, organizations need to take the next step to remain competitive, which is to orchestrate customer engagement processes and experiences.

A New Mindset

By shifting from a system integration to process orchestration mindset, organizations can substantially benefit from increased productivity, decreased costs and enhanced competitive and operational advantages, with endless opportunities for improved customer experience orchestration and more efficient agent performance. From an agent perspective, these advances provide more streamlined workspaces, simplified to display only the data that agents need, thereby increasing the pace and relevance of responsiveness to customers. The self-reliance of agents increases as technology guides them through customer interactions and responses while managing relevant processes.

Traditional system integration projects declare success when the data has moved from one system to the next and an agent can pick up the relevant data and begin the next step in the process. What we propose is building an experience that declares success by creating a simple experience for both agent and customer where any data movement between systems is completely transparent to the end-user. A true Managed Experience System delivers seamless processes while preserving legacy system functionality.