How CX Design and Orchestration Help Deliver a Competitive Experience

In today’s experience-based economy, a business is only as successful as its customers’ perception of it. You might offer the highest quality products or world-class services, but if interacting with your brand is inconvenient or frustrating, or otherwise leaves a bad taste in your customer’s mouth, you’re going to be at a disadvantage in the market.

Customers are always looking for brands to match or top their last best experience, and this concept crosses industry borders. So if, for example, your customer's most recent brand interaction was a stellar engagement with Apple, you’ve got big shoes to fill – even if you’re not in the technology space.

Last year, customer experience beat out pricing and product to become the key way consumers differentiate among brands. If you’re not prioritizing customer experience, you’re leaving revenue on the table.

So, how can you make sure you’re differentiating via the customer experience you’re delivering?

Making Customer Experience a Strategic Priority

In order to deliver experiences that set you apart from your competition, you need to make customer experience a strategic business priority and allocate the time, people, technology, and resources needed to support your CX goals.

There are two core strategic elements that you’ll need to deliver competitive customer experiences: design and orchestration. The intersection of these two elements is where great customer experiences are born.

CX Foundation & Design

From organizational awareness of customer experience prioritization to thoughtfully designed customer touchpoints, this element focuses on defining and improving all aspects of your customer experience.

Great CX design is wide-reaching and holistic, going beyond technological convenience to infuse every customer interaction with humanity and warmth. Every element of your overall growth strategy should take CX into consideration, from customer service and retention to expansion to new markets.

The first step to building an exceptional customer experience strategy is assessing your current state. Consider the following questions:

• Is every customer touchpoint delivering consistent, positive experiences?
• Is switching between channels causing any friction for your customers?
• Are you solving customer problems quickly and effectively?
• Are you checking in with your customers outside of difficult situations, keeping your brand top of mind in good times as well as crises?

Great design needs consistent, widespread buy-in and orchestration to achieve its goals.

CX Orchestration & Enablement

Orchestration takes the thinking and planning of design and transforms ideas into reality through a focus on people, processes, and technology.

Once you understand what you need to improve, a customer experience improvement roadmap can help you nail down the timeline and allocate the resources needed to make those improvements. You’ll want to make sure that every initiative incorporates CX, and that you’re investing in the right technologies and people to support your objectives.

Your customer experience orchestration should be focused on utilizing people, processes, and technology to enable the foundational components of CX:

• Know me - Building a holistic understanding of your customer through data collection and analysis
• Help me - Leaning on that data to ensure you’re providing your customers with the right information at the right time through the right channel
• Value me - Investing in technologies that streamline and simplify brand interactions for your customers and your employees throughout the entire customer lifecycle

It can be useful to hire a designated person or consultant to head up your CX transformation, to ensure that all parties across departments are doing their part to deliver differentiated, brand-aligned customer experiences.

Often, companies will invest significant resources on tools from Oracle or Salesforce in the hope that those investments alone will fix what ails their customer experience. But without a clearly-defined strategy, incorporating both the design and the orchestration elements, their money may be wasted.

Sophisticated technology isn’t enough on its own – you need to design the experience and integrate it with the technology to deliver a differentiating customer experience. The bird’s eye view you need to do this might be difficult to achieve from inside your organization, which is why it can be helpful to hire a consultant like Avtex.

Avtex has the level of expertise necessary across both design and orchestration to help with any customer experience challenge you might face. Our customer-first focus and dedication to a 360-degree view of your customer combined with our design and orchestration offerings, help you make a successful, organization-wide CX transformation.

These are just a few of our areas of expertise:

• Vision and Research
• Intelligence and Insights
• Journeys and Engagements
• Innovation and Development

Avtex continues to grow and evolve, but we never lose sight of our focus on:

• Client support and dedication
• Forward-thinking innovation
• Operational excellence
• CX design and orchestration

The importance of differentiating through customer experience can’t be overstated, and Avtex is here to help. Customer experience involves a lot of moving parts, but Avtex’s CX design and orchestration capabilities can help simplify it.