Keith Dawson's Analyst Perspectives

One way to think about the change in service and support in the current dynamic technological environment is to see it as a transition from managing interactions as they happen to managing the overall customer journey. It’s a lot harder to optimize a journey than an interaction. More people are involved, with different systems, key performance indicators and data sources, to cite just a few differences. Journeys represent an enterprise’s attempt to expand its awareness of the context in which it works with customers. What’s needed, though, is technology that helps a business identify and eliminate friction points, optimize contact pathways and perhaps most importantly, measure the long-term value of customers and how well a business realizes that value. In my view, journey management is the end-state for enterprise customer experience, a natural but long-awaited result of integrating contact centers with other CX tools and teams. As businesses move toward more integrated ecosystems, journey optimization platforms are evolving from niche solutions to essential components of the broader CX technology stack, connecting marketing automation, customer relationship management, customer service and operational systems to create a holistic view of the customer relationship. The move towards working with journeys instead of interactions is inevitable: ISG Research believes that by 2027, one-third of enterprises will be using artificial intelligence applications to map and manage customer journeys that integrate sales, service and marketing processes. So far, most enterprises’ experience with journey management has been very light. The fragmented nature of basic customer relationships into separate phases (presale, onboarding, usage, service, retention, etc.), each guided by a separate team, has made it difficult to draw a unified picture of customers as individuals and in aggregate. Even basic journey mapping is a cumbersome process. NICE Systems just released CXone Mpower Orchestrator, an application that appears to be a significant step forward in managing journeys across the enterprise. It is a component of NICE’s wide-ranging CXone Mpower platform, which has emerged as one of the best tool sets for automating and controlling the entire process of engaging with customers. Orchestrator comes along at a time when a series of revolutionary technologies are reshaping much of how contact centers and extended service processes are operated. It takes advantage of the ability of AI to control and optimize complex processes. Orchestrator proactively analyzes, optimizes and automates customer-service workflows across the enterprise. It’s hard to characterize this tool using traditional contact center or service framing. It’s not precisely an analytics system, though it incorporates sophisticated analytics into its functions. It’s unlike anything that traditional contact centers pre-2022 would have had access to, and more than that, it’s part of a system of tools that coordinate processes across departments. NICE hasn’t described Orchestrator in terms of journey management, which is understandable since the industry still hasn’t gotten its arms around exactly what a journey management system is supposed to accomplish. If we divide journey management into two parts, the “awareness’” part—understanding what is happening with and to customers anywhere in the enterprise—and the “take-action” part—intervening to achieve a specific outcome—then I think Orchestrator represents the current state of the art in synthesizing those needs. NICE has transformed itself in the past decade. Its origin point in contact center software has expanded outward to incorporate true enterprise CX capabilities based on post-contact center needs like digital interaction handling, deep customer analytics and process automation. The transformation has established NICE as a leader in contact center capabilities (see the ISG Advanced Contact Center 2024 Buyers Guide) and in broad customer experience management. I think it’s fair to say that NICE has helped redefine the fundamental elements that go into today’s customer handling, both at the point of interaction and behind the scenes, in CX decision-making. By leveraging the cross-functional insights and process automation capabilities developed for Orchestrator, NICE is transforming its existing applications from siloed tools into components of an integrated ecosystem. Seeing CX holistically instead of as a collection of isolated moments allows NICE’s analytics to move beyond point-in-time insights to find patterns and trends across complex, long-duration relationships. These automation applications are sure to become more contextually aware, with automated agents that understand where customers are in their journeys and adapt accordingly. Enterprises looking to adopt true enterprise CX strategies need tools that make it easy to knit together processes that spread across teams, systems and data resources. What CX practitioners will find with Orchestrator and its sibling tools in the Mpower platform are systems that provide a higher-level view of how those processes connect in subtle, sometimes invisible ways. And they’ll find themselves armed with potential solutions to emergent problems that can be tested and evaluated and then deployed with a minimum of fuss. As enterprises progress through the transition from reactive service to more subtle proactive engagement, they’ll naturally uncover stretches of the customer journey that can be improved and monetized. Until very recently, journey management tools have been disconnected and niche-focused. Orchestrator is a key stop on the road to a more controlled, organized CX strategy. Journey management is not just a technological challenge but a fundamental shift in organizational mindset. NICE is demonstrating its understanding of how enterprises should make that shift. Regards, Keith Dawson

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