Carter Busse, CIO, Workato
Dialling the number for a company call centre is unlikely to be your first choice of outreach nowadays, especially for younger generations, but many of us will remember when that was the only option.
If you experienced an issue, you needed to ring the company’s helpline first. This often resulted in listening to hours, and I mean hours, of terrible hold music before finally being put through to a person to discuss the query. Depending on the issue, you might have been referred to multiple different departments, having to explain the same issue every time.
This process may seem antiquated to some, but new innovations have been born out of these customer frustrations and have led to advanced and diverse customer service tools we’re familiar with today, such as online chat services, social media or interacting with chatbots. In fact, the customer experience (CX) industry is one of the earliest adopters of orchestration, transforming ways of working and the methods through which customer relationships are built.
In the last four years, expectations for CX have been turned on their head as the pandemic and the urgent need to provide CX services remotely forced customer support teams to rethink how they interact with and provide value to customers. It has become a major challenge – as well as a huge opportunity – for UK businesses.
Customer retention is the no.1 business priority
Amidst ongoing economic uncertainty, it is more important than ever for a business to retain its customers. The cost of new customer acquisition is extremely high, and companies can’t afford to lose the sustained revenue from existing clientele. Many would argue customer service is no longer just a key business priority but increasingly becoming the business priority in 2024.
As the stakes are so high, business leaders are readily turning to AI orchestration to assist with ensuring customer retention. According to Workato’s 2024 Automation Index, customer retention was the fastest growing priority when companies introduced orchestration into their processes.
AI-driven orchestration, with its experience-centric quality, is popular for its ability to help businesses to create intelligent, efficient services that maintain customer relationships. Every orchestration built translates to building a smooth experience for the employee, customer or other end user. A good way to think about it is that every orchestration investment is essentially an investment in the customer’s experience. For example, orchestration can dramatically speed up the process of fielding customer inquiries, track issues, and allow the customer service team to assign the correct issues to the correct group of people at the company much more quickly.
It is so powerful that CX is now accelerating its use of orchestration even further; the 2024 Automation Index calculated a 226% growth of automation in customer support and revealed that 30% of all automated processes focus on either customer or employee experience.
How CX benefits from orchestration
Generative AI orchestration is one of the most common tools for enhancing efficiency across all stages of CX from managing returns and refunds, to delivering superior customer support via service desks and chatbots. It can also be used to manage key customer interactions including experience surveys and customer onboarding. Interestingly, the same survey revealed the largest increase in CX orchestration was conducted within returns and refunds, with 338% growth.
Gen AI is also creating new ways to improve CX for the future and becoming more sophisticated in how it interacts with customers. As well as improving response times with its 24/7 availability, Gen AI can be trained to analyse customer data and interaction history to provide more personalised responses that reflect the company’s tone and brand style. It can also be trained carefully to understand and respect an infinite number of cultural nuances, ensuring that responses are tailored to be appropriate and respectful, enhancing the CX overall. Investing in a unified enterprise orchestration platform that integrates data, applications, processes, and user experiences will ensure that all customer data is secure, and enables CX teams manage, deploy, and oversee Gen AI solutions.
Over time, it can become a natural partner in the workplace for employees to collaborate on delivering excellent CX. However, it is never a human substitute and 11% of orchestrated processes from the Automation Index include humans ‘in the loop’. This evidence for maintaining a human role side by side with automation emphasises the relationship of the natural partner; teams collaborate with AI and are not replaced by it.
The future potential of orchestration in CX
By orchestrating services within customer support, businesses have a rare opportunity to reduce burdensome workloads so resources can be funneled towards customer retention. Orchestrating customer requests and escalations allows an organisation to prioritise its attention on business-critical issues, thereby minimising the associated costs. Similarly, using AI chatbots as the first responder to customers enables businesses to offer a best-in-class, configured CX while freeing the time of human support agents so they can focus on the most complex queries. Finding a solution that offers all of these capabilities on one platform will allow CX teams to control the work they are doing for customers, with the speed and power they require.
The ambition for CX to become a faster, more personalised service – leading to higher customer satisfaction and ultimately increasing customer loyalty – is something every business can benefit from in a highly competitive landscape. As the technology continues to evolve, it will increasingly become an essential component of any forward-thinking business strategy.
About the Author
Carter Busse is CIO, Workato.
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