How to Use AI to Design More Effective Customer Journeys

The AI playbook for designing sales, onboarding and support journeys

Large companies are constantly pivoting, especially today, when building customer journeys. Just when they catch up to what customers say they want, the expectations change again, and adjusting becomes urgent. 

Seamless, personalized interactions are expected. Consumers are consumers in all parts of their lives—work and home—so if they are getting robust personalization in one area, they expect it everywhere. Your business has to deliver if you want your customers to be committed to your product or service.

Here’s what’s tricky: Most organizations don’t have the tech infrastructure to do this, especially in financial services. Heavy iron systems, data and workflows are set in stone and difficult to change. They are even disconnected from each other, so enterprises can’t see the holistic profile of a customer to craft the right personalization.

McKinsey notes that 80% of corporate leaders believe their CX efforts are missing the mark. They point to the difficulty of orchestrating what should feel like a singular journey across siloed departments, legacy software and external partners.

Injecting generative AI intelligence into journey orchestration can solve this enduring problem. 

Why Journey Orchestration: Does it Matter?

There’s a misnomer that customer journey orchestration is nothing more than organizing a collection of internal workflows to standardize back-end processes. 

To be fair, customer journeys contain operational workflows but encompass more. Customer journeys also include every client-facing interaction with a company in different channels with different teams on different platforms, from pre-sales engagements to post-support reachouts. 

Ideally, customer journeys include multiple products and services, capturing touch points with sales, marketing, onboarding and support teams, and especially external partners like core providers, payment processors and equipment providers that act as subcontractors, fulfilling part of the journey for an enterprise. 

A great example is a B2B banking customer who chooses a treasury management product like positive pay or remote deposit. To deliver these services, the financial institution typically uses several third-party companies, all of which work with the shared customer at different points. 

However, most of these teams and companies can’t see what’s happening beyond their own steps in a journey. Sixty-three percent of IT and business leaders said half or more of their organization’s data is dark. For a bank that “owns” the customer relationship, that’s bad, especially if it’s a complicated, multi-step, lots-of-things-can-go-wrong journey like onboarding.  

Everyone agrees that working in the dark makes it impossible to provide seamless customer experiences, but what about the impact on the business KPIs?

Here are some facts:

• A 5% increase in customer retention can increase company profits by 25-95%, according to Bain & Company.
• Top-performing companies are 50% more likely than competitors to have a customer-centric journey.
• According to BCG, embracing a customer-journey-at-scale approach helps companies improve customer advocacy by 20 to 40%, reduce costs between 15% and 25%, and boost revenue by 10% to 20%.

Seventy-six percent of businesses quit onboarding a new financial product or service before they even used the product they signed up for. Their top complaints? Too many people were involved in onboarding, and there were communication and knowledge gaps they couldn’t resolve.

Disjointed journeys inconvenience customers and drain confidence in your brand and its ability to deliver on its promises. 95% of people don’t complain about bad service; they just leave. 

What’s the financial cost of losing customers? In her book Serving Them Right, Laurie Liswood estimates the cost of losing and replacing just 150 customers is $60,000! This expense could be avoided by removing pain points from customer journeys that lead to attrition. 

Top Customer Journey Pain Points

1. Disparate Data Sources and Fragmented Customer Information

Large enterprises have complex ecosystems, relying on multiple vendors and partners to deliver various parts of their customer journeys. This results in data silos, where critical customer information is scattered across different systems, making it hard to capture a unified view. 

When customer data is fragmented, of course, inconsistencies in experiences follow. Only 26% of organizations believe they provide a fully connected experience across all channels; that number is not good.

A customer interacting with sales may receive different messaging than the same customer dealing with support because the teams are accessing separate data sources. This leads to frustration on both sides, increasing churn and decreasing brand loyalty.

2. Inflexible Legacy Systems Stifle Innovation

Legacy systems remain one of the biggest roadblocks to modernizing customer experiences. These hard-coded, inflexible systems are expensive to modify and often can’t keep pace with today's rapidly changing expectations. 

This is particularly problematic for businesses that need to adapt customer journeys quickly, whether it’s introducing a new sales channel, altering the onboarding process, or responding to emerging trends in customer behavior. Enterprises tied to legacy systems cannot innovate, creating a significant competitive disadvantage.

3. Lack of Visibility Across Channels, Teams, and Partners

Another pressing issue is the need for more visibility into the full customer journey, especially when multiple departments or third-party partners are involved. Companies often find themselves with limited insights into how customers interact with them across channels—whether it’s digital, in-store, or through ecosystem partners. 76% of executives said their biggest roadblock to improved CX delivery is siloed data and a lack of integrated systems. That's a big number, but the worse news? That's an increase from 64% in 2023. The problem is growing.

According to a survey of CX professionals:

• 42% can’t integrate data sources from different systems
• 40% cannot identify the same customer across channels
• 38% don’t have unified customer profiles

The lack of real-time visibility (heck, any visibility!) in all aspects of the customer journey as it moves between teams and products keeps companies from providing the best possible experiences.

Why AI-Powered Journey Orchestration is the Future of CX

Businesses that gain sightlines into their touchpoints and interactions—both internal and external—suddenly have the power to anticipate and proactively manage customer expectations, removing friction and acting on opportunities that would be otherwise missed. 

Research shows companies that effectively manage and orchestrate customer journeys realize positive business results. A study by McKinsey found that companies that focus on journeys increase revenue by 10-15% and have a 20% jump in customer satisfaction. 

AI-powered journey orchestration addresses pain points by matching and unifying data, automating workflows, and delivering insights that encompass all of the customer’s profiles and journeys—at scale.

AI Unifies Data Across a Complicated Tech Stack 

AI is uniquely suited to bridge the gaps between fragmented data sources. Journey orchestration platforms that leverage AI can pull data from a wide array of systems—CRMs, marketing platforms, billing systems, external vendors—and present it in a holistic, actionable view. A complete customer profile, in any industry is vital today. 

Teams that can access a comprehensive customer profile that contains all of their data and interactions can better help customers reach their destination, which makes both the business and the customer happy. 

AI Automates and Optimizes Legacy Workflows

AI can overlay existing legacy systems, automating repetitive tasks and optimizing workflows without costly infrastructure overhauls. AI-driven orchestration allows enterprises to create new customer journey flows or adapt existing ones in real-time, without waiting for lengthy IT interventions. 

By automating and optimizing workflows, companies can quickly respond to shifts in customer behavior and market dynamics.

AI-driven orchestration allows for dynamic, real-time adjustments that traditional systems simply can’t match.

AI Unlocks Real-Time Insights 

The most powerful advantage of AI-powered journey orchestration is real-time visibility into the entire customer journey, across internal teams and external ecosystem partners. This end-to-end transparency gives businesses a heads-up to pain points and issues so they can proactively manage them before they escalate.

For example, if a customer experiences a service disruption with a third-party vendor during the onboarding process, AI can immediately notify the appropriate teams and provide contextual insights to resolve the issue. This level of proactive, real-time management results in significantly higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.

AI-Powered Customer Journey Orchestration Use Cases

AI is making it easier to manage and orchestrate customer journeys in several specific ways. 

1. Journey Optimization via AI Automation

AI-driven automation helps financial institutions streamline and optimize customer journeys by automating routine processes such as KYC (Know Your Customer) and transaction monitoring. 

AI systems can intelligently escalate cases to human agents when necessary, ensuring that only the most complex tasks require human intervention. For instance, AI can automate onboarding processes, flag any issues requiring manual review and accelerate routine tasks such as document verification.

Key Benefits:

• Reduced operational costs through automation
• Improved efficiency in onboarding and servicing
• Ensured compliance with industry regulations

2. AI Analytics to Guide and Enhance Journeys

AI's superpower is identifying trends, pulled from vast amounts of structured and unstructured data like call logs and case summaries. Those patterns can be used to predict future behaviors. For an industry like financial services, where each customer has unique financial profiles depending on life goals and events, AI can help banks adjust journeys or, with the right orchestration tool, actually design personalized journeys in real time. 

Key Benefits:

• Tailored recommendations based on behavior
• Increased customer satisfaction by being a consultative partner
• Lower churn through anticipating and meeting customer proactively

3. Journey Progression Across Channels

Customers often interact through multiple channels including mobile apps, call centers teams, chatbots and email. AI has an incredible memory, retaining customer interaction details and picking up the case or conversation from channel to channel. 

In addition, emerging channels like voice and text virtual assistants can be trained to respond in a brand voice, and they can even empower human agents by recommending branded responses so that the customer experience is the same high quality from person to person, interaction to interaction, providing uniform information. 

Key Benefits:

• Consistent experiences across all platforms
• Customers have uninterrupted cross-channel interactions
• Faster resolution having access to information on prior touchpoints

4. Real-time Alerts About Customer Sentiment and Friction 

AI can analyze customer conversations via chatbots, emails, or in the call center to determine customer emotion throughout the journey. Alerts can indicate if a customer is frustrated, stalled or happy, which provides an opportunity to calibrate journeys in the moment to address any problems before they turn into a lost customer.

Key Benefits:

• Proactively respond to negative customer emotions before they escalate
• Optimize satisfaction and loyalty by tailoring customer journeys in real-time
• Use sentiment analysis to find friction in customer journeys that might go unnoticed

5. Identify Fraud or Out-of-the-Ordinary Activity 

A unified customer profile, which captures interactions across a tech stack and multiple core systems, combined with always-on AI monitoring will note red flags more quickly, saving customers from potential fraud crises, which are costly and very inconvenient.

Key Benefits:

• Real-time fraud detection at scale is more robust and sophisticated than humanly possible.
• Improved trust and safety for customers; reduced losses for the enterprise

6. Regulatory Compliance and Risk Management

Compliance in regulated industries is an expensive and daunting task to monitor. AI makes it much easier to ensure any deviations from normal interactions are flagged immediately. 

Not only does AI minimize ongoing risk activity, but through automation, like summarizations, companies can also reduce the manual effort typically required for reporting on their compliance activities. This is especially true if those activities include third-party partners in their CX delivery ecosystem that don’t offer full visibility. 

Key Benefits:

• Real-time compliance monitoring
• Reduced risk of regulatory 
• Streamlined audit processes

The Critical Difference: Choosing a CX-First Company 

As AI becomes a more common tool in the CX space, enterprises are faced with a crucial decision: partner with a company deeply rooted in CX that uses AI to enhance their solutions or opt for an AI-first company trying to retrofit its technology to solve CX challenges.

CX Expertise Matters

CX companies that incorporate generative AI into their platforms understand the nuances of customer interactions and the intricate journey flows that enterprises must navigate. They know that while AI is a powerful tool, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. 

Instead, these companies use AI to augment human decision-making and enhance customer interactions. CX-first companies design AI solutions with customer experience at the forefront, using AI where it makes sense to improve service.

AI is a Tool to Optimize Journey Orchestration

AI-first companies, on the other hand, often lack the specialized knowledge required to address CX-specific challenges. Their focus is on the technology itself, which may result in solutions not tailored to customer journeys' intricacies. For companies that need a deep understanding of CX to succeed—particularly in industries like financial services, healthcare and retail, this can be a critical misstep.

The danger of choosing an AI-first company is that while the technology may be cutting-edge, it won’t necessarily solve enterprises' core problems in managing customer journeys. As a result, businesses may end up with a powerful AI tool but little improvement in their customer experience.

About OvationCXM and AI-Infused CX

OvationCXM was founded as a customer experience and support company, and we use AI to augment our expertise, not replace it. Our platform is the only CXM technology that uses a drag-and-drop journey builder alongside a robust ecosystem connector network to create sales, onboarding and support customer journeys from end-to-end, with internal teams and external partners included in a singular journey. 

Ai is naturally embedded in our tools. So you receive recommendations in real time as you build journeys to make them more effective, alerts where friction may exist and insights on what’s working well to replicate in other journeys. You can build from scratch, clone existing journeys to personalize them or tweak them for other projects. Make any of these changes in minutes, on the fly, without code.

Our CXM platform provides companies with agility, much needed in today’s businesses. It works seamlessly with legacy technology and partner platforms, so your entire ecosystem works together, as one team to best serve customers. Check out how our platform works and watch our Overview video for more.

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