3 steps to experience transformation

The experience economy has raised the bar for organizations everywhere. Consumers and employees take their expectations from any great experience into future interactions with other organizations, regardless of their size, industry or location. Meeting those expectations is imperative. The good news is they’re becoming more attainable because of the incredible advances in AI that unlock new ways for customers to self-serve, empower employees to tackle the most challenging customer issues, and equip supervisors to provide the coaching and guidance that deliver career pathways for their teams.

The way to tap into these innovations and improve engagement, loyalty and business outcomes is to embrace experience transformation. Like any transformation, it’s a process. Whether you’re embarking on the journey or preparing for the next step, here are three priorities every organization needs to focus on.

Move to the cloud

The first step in true experience transformation is to move your customer experience (CX) platform to the cloud. The cloud has massive advantages over on-premises technologies, including a lower carbon footprint, continuous innovation, more robust security and improved regulatory compliance.

?CX leaders worldwide say the biggest benefits of moving to the cloud include better access to data across channels and the ability to quickly add new capabilities, channels and features. But the biggest reason to move to the cloud is simple: The key to experience transformation is AI. And the best AI features are delivered seamlessly in the cloud.

The cloud is also the best way — if not the only way — to fuel AI with the massive amounts of real-time data that it requires to deliver the personalized experiences consumers expect today.

Get your data house in order

Without a comprehensive data strategy, it’s nearly impossible to take advantage of AI. Rich, contextual data is what keeps the AI flywheel turning.

The ongoing challenge is that data is siloed, living in different systems. Inconsistencies like duplicate or incomplete data, metadata that doesn’t match across those systems, and other seemingly simple challenges can make it nearly impossible to deliver connected end-to-end customer journeys.

To get started, take an inventory of the relevant data sources within your organization — those that can paint a 360-degree?picture of your customers. Look beyond the contact center to other functions and systems across the entire customer journey. Map out a strategy for connecting those data sources over time.

With a data strategy in place, you can begin cleansing and structuring data. This critical step ensures that the data can be trusted and puts it in a format for platforms to use.

Adopt AI

There’s an old saying that the journey of 1,000 miles starts with a single step. The same is true of AI. Leading organizations are reimagining their customer and employee experiences with AI by starting with small implementations that make a big impact.?

AI-powered copilots suggest the next best action to customer service representatives. Natural language chatbots that understand complex language help customers find answers and solve their problems through self-service. Advanced speech and text analytics solutions review all customer-agent interactions to provide supervisors with less subjective, more constructive learning opportunities for agent coaching.

And we’re just at the beginning of the AI journey. The best way to see how AI can benefit your organization is to dive in, experiment and learn.

Start by identifying use cases that will make a notable difference with minimal effort. For example, you could use an AI-powered bot to triage interactions. Or have AI handle tasks that require manual, repetitive efforts, such as post-interaction summarization.

Where do you have gaps in processes or fall-off in customer satisfaction? With those use cases in mind, define success metrics, pilot solutions and iterate.

The best AI models are built with ethical considerations at the core, so AI decisions are explainable — and humans are always part of the decision-making process.

Looking to learn more about the future of experience transformation and how AI can revolutionize your customer and employee experience? Join us at Genesys Xperience, May 13–15 in Denver.