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How ecosystems can elevate customer engagement and meet business goals

Scott Leete

EY Global Pega Alliance Relationship Director; EY Americas GTM Leader

3 minute read 09 Aug 2023

Related topics

Alliances
Consulting

Consistent cross-team collaboration and the right technology can remedy a disjointed customer journey.

In brief

  • Ecosystems can ensure a consistent customer experience while elevating engagement.
  • Creating a 1:1 customer experience demands the right mix of tech, data and touchpoints.

Technology in business is a constant, as is the continual evolution of tech itself. And as technology evolves, ensuring consistent, meaningful customer experiences at every touchpoint becomes increasingly difficult.

The more customer touchpoints an organization has, the greater the challenge of ensuring consistency throughout each customer’s journey. It’s a common refrain to hear customers describe each interaction as a separate event rather than a part of a consistent, unified — even seamless — brand experience.

But in seeking a remedy, too many companies are approaching each customer interaction as just that: a separate experience. To meet customers where they are, and provide the experience they seek, businesses must take a broad perspective, considering all customer interactions — what they have in common and what they don’t. And that takes a synthesis of technology, data and relationships.

That synthesis has a transformative power, and you get that through ecosystems.

The ecosystems that EY professionals orchestrate include many parts. From EY people and technology to our alliance partners — like Pega — to the client’s existing vendors’ frameworks, systems and technology systems. There are lots of pieces to the puzzle, but it’s a puzzle that fits together seamlessly.

EY Alliance partner: Pegasystems

 

Work smarter. Unify experiences. Adapt instantly. 

 

Pega is a low-code platform for artificial intelligence-powered decisioning and workflow automation. This EY Alliance partner builds agility into organizations to grow and scale for the future.

Learn more about the EY-Pegasystems Alliance

How EY can help

‘Your call has been disconnected’

 

Individuals want individualized experiences. We’re seeing a real demand for (and response to) interactions that are centered on customers at a personalized level. EY teams understand that providing those localized experiences demands business processes that are contextual and real-time in nature.
 

In essence, the closer business processes can get to making customer interactions feel like a 1:1 experience, the better the customer experience itself. The ecosystems that incorporate Pega are a great way of doing that.
 

Many businesses have approached different channels with different types of technology. They launched a mobile app. They built a website with self-service functionality. They’ve deployed chat capabilities. Yet, the technologies, data, workflow logic and rules across those channels is often unaligned.
 

Translating that reality to the customer experience results in disconnection. The mobile experience doesn’t reflect the online experience. Self-service is siloed because the interactive voice response (IVR) doesn’t get data from the self-service technology. Call center reps can’t see what the customer already tried online. Chat reps — and bots — have no view into any of this.
 

The result: customer frustration.

 

 

Contextual + consistent = customer satisfaction
 

Solving for this through an ecosystem bridges those divides and provides a consistent experience. Such was the case with a client of ours, a leading communications company.
 

The ecosystem we orchestrated identified ways to help our client improve their customer service — customer interactions, specifically. Part of the Pega technology suite is their Customer Decision Hub™, which helps propose the next-best action to take with clients.
 

We proposed leveraging this Pega technology to improve the client’s customer experience in such a way that it meshed with their existing systems and technology. This approach spanned all client interactions with the IVR system, call center, chatbots and live agent assist.
 

Thanks to how we understood our client — their business issues and aims — we could leverage Pega technology, so it provided the most value to not just the client but their customers as well.
 

With centralized decisioning and workflows along with intelligent process automation, client interactions that were once separate are now less so. And that means increased customer engagement and elevated operational excellence.

 

 

The power of EY-orchestrated ecosystems: proving greater than the sum of our parts

EY teams are orchestrating opportunities and helping clients realize tremendous benefits by coalescing multiple elements: EY services, Pega, client systems and legacy vendors, along with related technologies.

Summary 

To meet customers’ needs and develop trust and loyalty, businesses must consider all customer interactions, which requires a deep dive into technology, data and relationships.

About this article

Scott Leete

EY Global Pega Alliance Relationship Director; EY Americas GTM Leader

Passionate about the value our Pega relationship brings to EY clients. Leisure travel enthusiast. Beach lover. Foodie. Proud father of three.

Related topics

Alliances
Consulting

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.