Gen AI is Transforming Experiences
In this era of AI everywhere, one thing is clear: GenAI is not just another technological advancement. It is significantly impacting many aspects of enterprises – and experiences are a huge component of this. GenAI is truly becoming a game changer in terms of the unprecedented level of hyper personalization it brings to the table.
Imagine a situation where you, as a customer, are ordering groceries online. A GenAI -enabled agent can anticipate ahead of time what items you tend to put in your cart and provide you with multiple alternatives of those out of stock, depending on your desired delivery date and time. Further, it can share with you active promos on items you tend to purchase without you having to look or search for them one by one. This would make my day to day tasks so much easier.
The value discussion is evolving – moving away from traditional methods of measuring success of CX initiatives, where it is customer metrics such as customer satisfaction, or financial metrics such as revenue, and profitability. Organizations are looking to connect the value of their CX efforts to the impact on all the stakeholders in this experience ecosystem – internal and external.
APJ organizations are recognizing this opportunity and moving fast to act on it. According to IDC’s FERS Wave 3 2024 Survey, 49.6% of APJ organizations are in initial testing stage, while 40.3% are investing significantly in GenAI.
However, 55.2% organizations are still struggling to connect AI-powered applications and technology projects to business outcomes, according to IDC’s FERS Wave 1 2024 survey results. There is still a long path to traverse to realize value from potential of these modern technologies.
Enter the Experience-Orchestrated Business (X-OB) Model
To design experiences that span processes, applications, channels, and intelligent exchanges between the entire ecosystem of stakeholders, IDC has put forth the construct of the experience-orchestrated (X-O) business.
An X-O business thrives due to its ability to deliver shared experience value powered by intelligence. To compete in an AI everywhere world, digital businesses must orchestrate a meaningful value exchange between the organization and their key stakeholders.
Data is vital to intelligent applications embedded in daily operations and decision-making. Insights help align actions with desired outcomes and ensure that investments deliver the desired results for the experience-orchestrated business. Using AI-enabled technology to optimize journeys and automate workstream tasks, organizations can break down organizational silos and foster connectedness across the experience ecosystem.
Where Does X-O Fit into the CX World
This model provides a way for all the CX stakeholders to evaluate their capabilities across the four key pillars – connections, intelligence, culture, and actions.
1. Connections: This means transforming the environment we are working in towards more cross-functional collaboration, real-time data sharing, and integration.
For customer service/support teams, this means they would be able to maintain context across interactions, reduce customer effort, provide more proactive customer engagement, and enhance their overall service quality.
For marketing and sales teams, this means a unified brand voice, consistent communication, seamless transfer of leads from marketing to sales, and so on.
When all three collaborate effectively, it can help unlock cross-selling/up-selling opportunities, integrated customer support, and consistency across channels and touchpoints.
2. Intelligence: Intelligence from automated processes can be used to optimize experiences further. Any new technology comes with risks – brand, data privacy, and compliance to name a few when it comes to GenAI. Building trust is critical – customers are becoming increasingly conscious and cautious about how and what data they are sharing across different apps and brands.
Being able to do this effectively means customer support teams have automation in place to streamline customer service processes and speed up time to resolution. Further, AI is at the driver’s seat guiding them with context-aware prompts to reply to customers, or directly being able to address customer queries.
Marketing teams can automate a greater number of manual tasks ranging from SEO, end-to-end campaign management, predicting future engagement trends, and identifying opportunity areas for improvement.
There is also the element of being able to generate more relevant content, which includes hyper personalized campaigns, towards improved engagement and conversion rates. Sales teams would be empowered with the relevant customer context before calls, higher quality leads, and so on.
3. Culture: Culture, often ignored, forms a critical part of attracting, skilling, and retaining the right talent within an organization. More often than not, organizations tend to focus on output as a measure of success. This needs to change and become more outcome-oriented. For example, customer satisfaction from closed cases should be prioritized over number of cases (effective case resolution) closed in a given time interval (productivity).
There is a need to establish joint and consistent metrics across CX, marketing, and sales. Service quality and the experience provided to the customer take precedence over productivity.
CX, marketing, and sales teams gain incentives based on customer impact – how seamless they made the experience for the customer, continuous improvement based on predictive insights, recognizing sales reps who go the extra mile to resolve customer pain points over just those who bring in the most opportunities.
4. Actions: This refers to being able to engage stakeholders in a context-aware manner. This is a result of having the right tools and technologies in place to actively listen to the various cues (sentiment, intent, behavior, etc.), and convert into actionable insights.
GenAI is great at consuming large amounts of structured and unstructured data. This large amount of data should be filtered to identify that of value. Once CX, marketing, and sales teams are armed with these insights – they can more effectively respond to customer needs ahead of the customer asking for it and in real time. All the customer micro-moments are opportunities to act fast, if you are slow, you lose out to many others in the market.
Assessing where organizations are in their ability to have all these pillars in place, will help them identify the opportunity gaps to maximize value to all the stakeholders (partners, employees, customers, community, and so on). Those who realize where they are in their journey and have a roadmap ahead on how to embed this XOB will seek to gain a significant competitive market advantage amid increasing digital sameness of experiences, where value is imperative.
