Around 65% of consumers now use messaging apps like WhatsApp to engage with companies, research from Salesforce shows. WhatsApp, owned by Meta Platforms, has evolved from a simple personal messaging tool to a platform for customer engagement and loyalty.

Using messaging apps like WhatsApp is about meeting customers where they are. As the third most popular app worldwide, WhatsApp has a whopping 2 billion users, of which 1.54 billion interact with WhatsApp for Business accounts, making it impossible for brands to ignore.

WhatsApp for Business includes a range of communication tools—a free app, an advanced API platform, and an ad format that directs users to the app, along with extra features that help businesses of any size handle customer communication at scale.

Around 68% of WhatsApp users believe it’s the most convenient way to engage with brands, according to Freshworks. That suggests the app should be a key element of a brand’s omnichannel customer service strategy, offering a way to connect with customers in a channel they prefer to use.

WhatsApp offers the convenience of asynchronous communication, allowing customers to reach out to brands in their own time. By providing 24/7 availability through AI agents and live support, as well as Quick Replies and Automated Messages, companies can eliminate the frustration of only being available during business hours, when customers themselves may be unavailable.

Businesses can use the app to create engaging, personalized customer interactions with its rich media features incorporating images and videos.

In addition, with security a growing concern among businesses, it’s worth noting that WhatsApp uses end-to-end Signal encryption to keep messages private and ensure customer information is protected. Meta ensures WhatsApp Business Platform is compliant with the General Data Protection Legislation (GDPR) and other key regulatory requirements.

WhatsApp for Business Becomes Default Loyalty Channel in Asia-Pacific

Brand outcomes in Asia-Pacific highlight the importance of having a WhatsApp strategy. Of the 1.54 billion WhatsApp Business users, around 748 million are in Asia-Pacific, compared with 130 million in North America. With so many people in Asia using the app every day, the region shows how naturally companies can work it into their customer conversations.

Regional insights from polling firm YouGov show that 32-43 percent of consumers in the Asia-Pacific region use business messaging to complete purchases, track orders, and connect with brands, especially during major sales and seasonal campaigns. Similarly, Infobip’s Messaging Trends Report points to Asia-Pacific as the world’s fastest-growing messaging region, driven by dynamic markets like Indonesia, the Philippines and China. The region saw a 51 percent increase in conversational messaging in 2024, led by a doubling in WhatsApp growth to 100 percent.

As business messaging has become integrated into the customer lifecycle, WhatsApp has, in effect, become the default loyalty channel for high-intent customer engagement in the region, according to Meta.

“We are seeing the shopping journey become more conversational because consumers now want dialogue, not one-way marketing,” said Vicky Yiu, APAC Strategic Partnership Manager, Business Messaging at Meta.

“WhatsApp is increasingly becoming the commerce layer for brand engagement in Asia. Customers don’t just browse — they consult, request support, complete transactions, and revisit brands all within messaging threads.”

L’Occitane’s WhatsApp-First Strategy

At the recent Commerce Leadership Forum held at Meta Singapore’s office, French beauty brand L’Occitane stated that WhatsApp now accounts for more than 80 percent of its inbound and outbound customer conversations in Asia-Pacific, becoming its primary customer touchpoint across different markets.

“By using WhatsApp as a unified touchpoint, we can move customers seamlessly from online discovery to in-store engagement without losing context,” said Terrence Siu, Chief Information Officer, APAC at L’Occitane. “Customers enjoy a consistent and personalized experience wherever they interact with us, be it on Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp.”

The brand extends this into a loyalty journey by staying connected with customers through the app so that they continue to feel guided and valued after the first transaction.

“By distributing samples and exclusive VIP offers directly through WhatsApp, we can convert interest into purchase immediately in the same channel the customer already uses,” Siu added. “This approach has lifted our coupon redemption rate to 87%. Once the customer is connected, we continue the journey through personalized refill and replenishment reminders, helping us maintain an ongoing relationship rather than a one-time transaction.

“WhatsApp has become a loyalty bridge — from sampling, to purchase, to repeat purchase — all within one seamless customer journey.”

Across the region, it has become apparent that loyalty sticks only when customers are actively engaged, rather than passively included. As Alan Chan, CEO and Founder of Omnichat put it:

“Points sitting in an app don’t translate into customer relationships, but loyalty delivered through WhatsApp stays close to the customer’s daily behavior.”

Rather than waiting for customers to remember a loyalty program, brands can link QR codes to product samples, in-store touchpoints and messaging-based rewards to proactively engage members in real time.

“This is the difference between a loyalty database and a loyalty journey. When customers are reminded, recognized and rewarded in the channel they already use every day, loyalty becomes a habit,” Chan said, adding:

“[A]nd unlike apps, no one uninstalls WhatsApp.”

Using WhatsApp to keep customer relationships active means retention doesn’t have to be expensive. Brands in Asia-Pacific are showing the way by moving away from one-time campaigns and toward relationship-led loyalty that leans into conversational commerce where customers are already having real conversations.

Yet many organisations still rely on traditional automation systems that struggle to meet these demands.  

Rigid IVR flows, generic chatbot scripts and siloed customer data often create more frustration than value, leaving customers repeating themselves and brands losing control of the customer journey. 

According to Gaurav Anand, VP and Head of Customer Interaction Suite at Tata Communications, many companies suffer from what he calls the “customer journey black hole” – a gap where context and customer history fall through the cracks, resulting in broken experiences and unnecessary friction. 

“Think about a typical banking interaction,” Anand says.  

“A customer fills in a loan application online, then calls the contact centre for support, only to be asked to provide the same information again. It’s no surprise that customers become frustrated.  

The consequence isn’t just dissatisfaction – 92 percent of customers say they’ll leave a brand after two or more poor experiences.

The Limits of Traditional Automation 

Even as businesses invest in automation to manage scale, traditional systems are increasingly showing their age.  

Script-based chatbots struggle to interpret nuanced intent.  

IVR systems force customers into predefined paths that rarely reflect what they actually want.  

And behind the scenes, data remains fragmented across CRM systems, ticketing platforms, and communication channels. 

“Legacy automation solves tasks, not outcomes,” Anand explains. “It might complete a form or look up an account, but it doesn’t understand the end goal of the interaction. It doesn’t collaborate with other systems.  

“It doesn’t adapt when the customer deviates from the script. Ultimately, it can’t orchestrate a full journey.” 

As customer journeys become more complex and decentralised, these limitations are becoming untenable.  

Organisations are now looking for a more intelligent and adaptive approach that can engage customers in real time, maintain continuity, and drive tangible results. 

Agentic AI in Action 

This is where agentic AI comes into play.  

Unlike traditional automation, agentic AI is built around autonomous, outcome-driven agents that can reason, collaborate and take contextual decisions.  

These agents can be trained for specific use cases such as cart abandonment recovery, KYC completion, proactive service notifications or multi-step issue resolution. This helps brands transition from basic automation to autonomous actions and AI decisioning.  

“Agentic AI is purpose-built,” Anand says. “Each agent understands the goal it needs to achieve, but it also knows how to work with other agents throughout the journey.  

“So you may have one agent focused on customer onboarding, another handling verification, and another coordinating follow-ups – all sharing context in the background.” 

This type of orchestration is increasingly essential for large enterprises. In e-commerce, for example, an agentic AI flow can detect a customer abandoning a cart, trigger hyper-personalised reminders across SMS, WhatsApp or email, and follow up based on engagement. If the customer expresses confusion or dissatisfaction, the agent can switch channels or escalate to a human agent with full context. 

“You’re no longer relying on one-size-fits-all automation,” Anand adds.  

You’re creating a dynamic loop that adapts to each customer’s needs and behaviours.

Voice AI: Transforming Real-Time Interactions 

The rise of voice AI is taking things a step further.  

Advanced speech-to-speech models now enable natural, human-like interactions that go far beyond traditional voice bots.  

These systems can understand real intent, detect emotion, and respond conversationally – making voice channels significantly more efficient and engaging. 

“For many customers, voice is still the channel of choice,” Anand notes.  

“But the experience has often been painful because legacy IVR is so restrictive. With voice AI, customers can speak normally and get real-time problem solving without navigating menus or waiting for an agent.” 

Tata Communications is seeing growing demand for voice AI in sectors such as banking, utilities, retail and travel, where customers frequently need rapid support with complex queries.  

When combined with agentic AI, voice agents can collaborate with other AI systems, retrieve information, complete tasks and escalate with full context when human support is required. 

“The beauty of voice AI is that it doesn’t break the flow,” Anand says. “If an escalation is needed, the human agent gets the full transcript, sentiment analysis and journey history. The customer never has to start again.” 

A Unified Approach 

Tata Communications has integrated these capabilities into a unified platform that connects multiple AI agents, voice systems and human support teams through powerful APIs and data connectors.  

The goal is to create a single interaction fabric that ensures continuity across every channel. 

“When an AI agent hands over to a human, or vice versa, all context is preserved,” Anand explains.  

“This is critical. If customers have to repeat themselves, the customer feels unheard and the journey becomes painful. Our platform eliminates that friction by ensuring that every agent – human or AI – understands the full picture.” 

The company has already seen strong results.  

One electric vehicle brand achieved a 25 percent increase in customer follow-through after deploying agentic AI-driven outreach.  

A large e-commerce marketplace reduced return-to-origin orders by 45 percent following the introduction of AI-powered WhatsApp workflows. 

“These are not incremental improvements,” Anand highlights. “They are major operational gains driven by intelligent automation that understands the customer’s intent.” 

Human-First, Outcome-Driven CX 

Despite the advances in AI, Anand emphasises that human expertise remains essential.  

Tata Communications’ approach is intentionally hybrid – using AI to handle repetitive tasks, streamline journeys and provide real-time insights, but ensuring humans remain central to complex, high-empathy interactions. 

“The best CX strategy is human-first,” he says. “AI should enhance human capability, not replace it. When AI and humans collaborate, you deliver outcomes that are personalised, proactive and genuinely valuable. That’s the future of customer experience.” 

As enterprises look to modernise their digital engagement, agentic AI and voice AI are emerging as critical technologies that can close the customer journey black hole and deliver the seamless, context-aware experiences customers expect. 

To explore how your organization can overcome the customer journey black hole and create seamless, unified experiences, contact Tata Communications to learn more about their integrated CX platform capabilities.   

This feature is designed to further the Amazon Connect Email platform, utilizing built-in capabilities that enable agents to deliver quicker response times. 

The workflow tool is the latest addition to AWS’s email and contact center capabilities. 

Released in November 2024, Amazon Connect Email is an omnichannel support feature that enables customer service agents to respond to and divert customer emails all within the same system as voice and chat, allowing agents to handle customer queries in a single space. 

The AI-enhanced email workflow tool enhances Amazon Connect Email by allowing service agents to expedite email customer service through automation capabilities. 

By utilizing large language models (LLMs), these AI-powered workflows can allow Amazon Connect to analyze emails, detect customer intentions, assess potential risks or complexity from the interaction, and evaluate next steps. 

After analyzing the email, the tool will provide a summary of the customer’s profile and any previous activity with the enterprise, the determined query category, and a brief rundown of the email to help tailor the response accurately. 

This tool also grades the received email based on how confidently it understands the message with Amazon Bedrock API and Claude AI, factoring in clarity, tone, topics, risk assessment, and time sensitivity, while also considering whether the customer is part of any premium packages by retrieving the user’s profile. 

This profile retrieval will include the customer’s current credit score, service level, and contact history to help the tool further evaluate the email score. 

After this, the tool implements a two-step process, where the LLM produces binary outputs for each negative factor it recognizes, using an embedded mathematical function to ensure the calculations align with the scoring evaluation. 

Enterprises can also personalize the scoring framework to fit their needs and determine the number of emails routed to an agent. 

Once a score has been determined, the email will receive either a generated response (if the score is 80 or higher) or be routed to an agent’s inbox for a personalized response (if the score is lower than 80), whilst also providing an explanation detailing how the tool determined the score. 

To simplify future interactions, the tool can automatically generate a case detailing the email and information previously gathered, allowing agents to view conversation history from a single place where email handling has occurred with generative AI.  

Agents can also personalize AI-generated responses to keep human intelligence in the loop and can add AI-powered workflows to Amazon Connect Email via Amazon Bedrock. 

What This Tool Means For Customer Experience 

The Amazon Connect AI-enhanced email workflows allow enterprises to bridge the gap between customer demand and agent availability through automating repetitive email tasks and filtering complex queries to agents, providing customers with human responses and agents with enhanced productivity where needed. 

These AI-powered workflows outrun traditional automation systems by understanding context clues behind interactions, including emotion and characteristic human responses by analyzing a customer’s profile. 

This avoids agents from partaking in repetitive research tasks and instead solving complex, human-based problems to deliver solutions that an LLM cannot solve, resulting in higher levels of meaningful work for the agent. 

This also resolves issues with email backlogs, customer survey responses, and agent exhaustion, driving improvements in customer service. 

Yet, many enterprises are struggling to deliver on this promise, falling victim to what experts call the “customer journey black hole.”  

This phenomenon occurs when customer data, context, or information are lost between interactions, creating fragmented and frustrating experiences that can cost brands both loyalty and revenue. 

Gaurav Anand, VP and Head of Customer Interaction Suite at Tata Communications, describes the black hole as the exact opposite of what brands intend to deliver.  

“Your data – whether it’s for an inquiry, a product question, or a complaint – is going in one channel and then getting lost. That’s the black hole side of it,” he explains.  

And the impact of this journey black hole is severe. It’s not just that the customer is unhappy. Your actual business numbers are getting impacted. 

Why It Happens: Silos, Channels, and Technology Gaps 

The consequences of a fragmented customer journey are stark. A study by PwC found that 92% of customers would abandon a brand after two or more negative interactions. 

In other words, every dropped call, unresolved query, or repeated customer statement represents a potential lost sale, diminished brand trust, and decreased customer lifetime value. 

The causes of the black hole are multifaceted. Enterprises often operate in silos, with marketing, product, billing, and support teams holding pieces of the customer puzzle in separate systems that do not communicate with each other.  

Misaligned channels exacerbate the problem, as customer preferences differ by demographic, time of the day, their stage in the journey etc. For example a younger consumer may prefer messaging apps, while older generations often prefer phone calls. 

Technology gaps, such as disconnected AI solutions and multiple vendor systems, along with operational inefficiencies, further worsen the situation.  

And in today’s world, if the hand-off from AI to humans loses context and customers have to repeat themselves, then this black hole can be pretty deep.  

The Cost of Ignoring the Black Hole 

The impact extends beyond customer experience metrics. Anand points out that “closing these gaps is just not about improving customer experience. It’s about protecting the brand value and the value of the businesses that these brands are in.”  

Fragmented customer interactions can cost enterprises significantly in lost sales, operational inefficiencies, and increased churn, underscoring why addressing the black hole is not just a CX priority, but a business imperative. 

When customer data is lost or mismanaged, brands risk reduced sales, operational inefficiency, and reputational damage, as negative experiences can spread quickly in the age of social media. 

Compliance and privacy requirements can also unintentionally introduce friction, making it more challenging to provide smooth, personalized interactions. Ignoring the black hole may result in a slow erosion of customer trust, which competitors can capitalize on. 

Closing the Gap: Unified CX and AI Solutions 

Addressing the black hole requires a holistic approach.  

Enterprises need to unify their data and orchestrate interactions across all touchpoints to streamline operations. This includes ensuring that every channel communicates with the others, maintaining context between interactions, and empowering human agents with the right information at the right time.  

AI can help, but only if fed with contextual & comprehensive data and deployed thoughtfully, maintaining continuity between automated and human-led experiences. 

The payoff is significant. Brands that achieve seamless, data-driven experiences can reduce churn, increase engagement, and extract actionable insights from end-to-end journey analytics. In a competitive marketplace, providing frictionless experiences is no longer optional – it’s a differentiator.  

As Anand warns, “It sounds simple, but the customer has high expectations. And if their expectations aren’t met, they will leave. The black hole is real, and brands cannot afford to ignore it.” 

As more enterprises confront the customer journey black hole, many are turning to unified CX strategies that bring together communications, data, and AI.  

Companies like Tata Communications are helping organizations reimagine this space – integrating CPaaS, CCaaS and CXP technologies to create more connected, context-rich interactions.  

It’s a shift from managing channels to orchestrating journeys – a move that could define the next era of customer experience. 

To explore how your organization can overcome the customer journey black hole and create seamless, unified experiences, contact Tata Communications to learn more about their integrated CX platform capabilities.

For enterprises, that’s both a challenge and an opportunity. Handled properly, feedback reveals exactly where things are and aren’t working. It tells support teams which moments frustrate. It tells product teams what’s missing, and it tells the C-suite what customers value enough to fight for.

That’s the real job of customer feedback management, turning scattered input into structured insight, then routing it to the teams that can actually do something with it.

The best CFM systems don’t just capture data. They:

• Map feedback across the full journey, not just surveys
• Spot trends early, before they show up in churn
• Connect insight directly to actions: faster support, better products, clearer messaging

In short, modern customer feedback management platforms give enterprises a new kind of muscle: the ability to listen deeply, move early, and improve continuously

What is Customer Feedback Management?

Customer feedback management is the discipline of collecting, interpreting, and acting on customer sentiment – not just from surveys, but from every channel where customers leave a mark.

That might mean tracking a drop in CSAT after a product update, combing through live chat logs, or decoding a two-star review on Trustpilot. In most enterprise settings, it means building a feedback loop that crosses teams: product, marketing, service, and operations all relying on the same source of truth.

The best customer feedback management software doesn’t just store responses. It translates them into structured insight, surfacing trends, routing complaints, and pushing alerts to the right place, fast. It’s the glue between listening and resolution.

To work at scale, feedback systems typically include:

• Multichannel ingestion: Web forms, support tickets, NPS, app reviews, even social DMs. Every signal matters, even if it’s unstructured.
• Theme detection and prioritization: Tools flag repeat issues or keyword clusters before they become reputational risks.
• Workflow integration: A refund complaint can notify finance. A delivery bug can trigger a ticket in product ops.
• Dashboards and reporting: With the help of AI systems, leaders get a filtered view of real insights by product line, geography, or channel.

Leading companies aren’t collecting feedback in a vacuum. They’re wiring it directly into CRM systems, contact center tools frontline workflows, so the right people can act without delay. The tighter the integration, the faster teams can respond, fix what’s broken, and strengthen customer relationships that last.

Where Feedback Fits: Feedback Management, VoC, and EFM

Feedback is only useful if it leads somewhere. That’s where terminology starts to matter. Voice of the Customer (VoC), customer feedback management, and enterprise feedback management (EFM) are often used interchangeably. They shouldn’t be.

Customer feedback management is the engine room. It handles collection, sorting, tagging, and routing. Think of it as the operational layer that turns raw input from surveys, ratings, and comments into tasks and decisions. This is where data moves from inboxes and dashboards into action plans.

Voice of the Customer (VoC) goes broader. It doesn’t just listen to what customers say, it listens to how they feel, how they behave, and where they’re frustrated or delighted without necessarily saying it outright. A good VoC program blends direct feedback with behavioral signals and sentiment analysis. It’s about seeing the full picture.

Enterprise feedback management (EFM) stretches even further. It includes employee and partner insight, compliance triggers, internal process reviews, and often sits closer to risk management than CX. In highly regulated or distributed organizations, EFM is essential infrastructure.

At enterprise scale, feedback management isn’t just a support tool. It’s part of the system of record: connected to customer data platforms, CRMs, business intelligence tools, and employee engagement systems (WEM tools).

Each of these frameworks adds something. The most mature organizations use all three as parts of one loop: listen, understand, and act.

What is Customer Feedback Management? Feedback Types

Customer feedback isn’t always a form or a star rating. It’s often informal, unstructured, or buried in systems where no one’s looking. Recognizing the different types is the first step toward building something that works across departments and channels.

• Direct Feedback: The most visible kind. Surveys after support calls. CSAT and NPS prompts. Product reviews submitted through apps or portals. It’s usually structured, timestamped, and easy to analyze. But it’s also the most filtered. The people who answer tend to be at the emotional extremes, either thrilled or annoyed. Everyone else stays quiet.
• Indirect Feedback: This is what customers say when they’re not talking to you directly. Tweets. Public forum threads. Online reviews. Complaints posted to third-party sites. In many organizations, this insight slips through the cracks. But today’s customer feedback management platforms use NLP and sentiment tools to bring these comments into view before they become brand problems.
• Inferred Feedback: This is the feedback customers don’t say out loud, but show in what they do. Dropping out halfway through checkout. Asking the same question in three different places. Bouncing between help pages without finding what they need.

On their own, these signals can be easy to miss. But together, they reveal patterns of frustration that direct surveys might never surface.

Why Customer Feedback Management Matters

There’s no shortage of dashboards in a modern enterprise. But few of them speak with the voice of the customer. That’s what feedback management changes. It shifts insight from lagging reports to live reality, focusing on the real-time pulse of what customers need, want, and expect.

For enterprise leaders focused on customer experience, this isn’t a soft metric. It’s operational. According to Bain & Company, companies that excel at customer experience grow revenues 4%–8% above their market. But growth doesn’t come from tracking satisfaction scores alone. It comes from turning those scores into action.

Here’s where feedback becomes a business driver:

• Alignment Across Teams: Sales hears one thing. Support hears another. Product has a third backlog entirely. When feedback lives in separate systems, teams solve different problems. When it’s centralized, patterns emerge, and teams move in the same direction.
• Early Signal Detection: A broken link on a signup form. A billing process that’s confusing in one region. A surge in cancellation requests. Customer feedback management platforms surface these issues before they hit churn reports. The earlier the fix, the lower the cost.
• Smarter Roadmapping: Feedback isn’t just a support signal, it’s a product roadmap tool. Tracking customer insights, linking them to outcomes, and activating responses leads to strategic action. Teams can prioritize features that drive loyalty.
• Competitive Advantage: Every brand says it listens. Few can prove it. Companies that consistently close the loop visibly earn trust. In a market where switching costs are low, trust is often the only real moat.

The case for customer feedback management software isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about agility, spotting the next risk or opportunity while competitors are still guessing.

How to Build a Customer Feedback Management System That Works

Enterprises don’t lack feedback. They’re swimming in it. The challenge isn’t collection, but coordination. Scattered responses, siloed ownership, and no clear plan for what happens next. That’s where customer feedback management becomes a system, not just a task.

1. Start with What You Already Have

Before adding new tools or channels, map what’s in play. Most enterprise teams already gather feedback across:

• Post-interaction surveys
• Help desk conversations
• Social and review platforms
• Product feedback forms
• Sales and account notes

But it’s often fragmented, or locked in spreadsheets, CRM fields, and third-party platforms. Start by listing every touchpoint where customers leave a trace. Then identify who owns that data, how it’s reviewed, and whether it drives action.

2. Build a Shared System, Not Just a Repository

A true customer feedback management system isn’t just a bucket. It’s a hub. One place where cross-functional teams can view, analyze, and act on insights. That requires more than storage. It needs structure. Look for tools that:

• Integrate with your CRM system and CDP
• Tag feedback by source, product line, sentiment, urgency
• Offer role-specific dashboards for ops, product, CX, compliance
• Allow for routing, escalation, and response tracking

Consider other integrations that might be helpful too, such as connections to your ERP and business intelligence platforms, or workforce management tools.

3. Design a Feedback-to-Action Pathway

Without clear ownership, feedback dies in the backlog. Teams need to agree on what gets prioritized, who responds, and how it loops back into service design, training, or product fixes.

The strongest systems:

• Flag urgent or high-impact issues automatically
• Route insights to the right teams (with deadlines)
• Track outcomes, not just volume
• Communicate resolution back to the customer

When that loop works, feedback becomes part of how the business runs.

How to Use Feedback to Improve Business Results

Most companies collect feedback. Fewer actually do something meaningful with it. In mature organizations, feedback isn’t just a sentiment report, it’s a driver of change. Done right, it informs strategy, sharpens execution, and reduces churn.

• Prioritize patterns over outliers: It’s easy to get caught up in the latest complaint or viral review. But high-performing teams step back. They look for volume, frequency, and trends, not just anecdotes. That could mean mapping repeat issues to product features, or tracking common service pain points over time.
• Feed insight to the right systems: Don’t keep customer feedback on a CX dashboard. Use it to inform product roadmaps, workforce planning, pricing models, training strategies, and anything else that impacts the customer experience.
• Expand your metrics: Go beyond NPS and CSAT. Think about customer effort scores, overall retention rates and churn. Determine the KPIs you want to keep track of in advance, and make sure everyone is watching them, including the C-Suite.

Choosing Customer Feedback Management Software

Customer feedback is everywhere. What separates good companies from great ones is what they do with it. That’s where the right customer feedback management software comes in, to make insights actionable, accountable, and accessible across the enterprise.

Start With the Business, Not the Tool

Software selection should begin with the problems it’s meant to solve. Are customers dropping off after onboarding? Or are service complaints slipping through the cracks? Are product teams getting insight too late to act?

Clear goals tend to point to the right tool:

• Real-time alerts for contact center agents?
• Text analytics for unstructured NPS comments?
• Trend reporting to inform product roadmaps?

Once those use cases are clear, it becomes easier to separate the platforms built for scale from those that just tick boxes.

Integration Over Isolation

In a modern tech stack, no system should sit alone, especially not feedback.

Customer insights gain power when connected to:

• CRM platforms, where individual records tell a full customer story
• Contact center solutions, where timing and channel matter
• CDPs, which consolidate behavioral and transactional data
• BI tools, for deeper cross-functional reporting
• Broader ERP, WEM, and business management tools

Make sure your platforms feed the systems powering decisions.

Think Long-Term: Governance, Scalability, and Fit

Even the most powerful platform will struggle without strong foundations. For enterprise buyers, that means focusing on operational readiness:

• Can the system support multiple teams and regions with clear permissions?
• Are escalation workflows and approvals built in?
• Does the vendor offer strong uptime guarantees and compliance controls?
• Is the reporting flexible enough to satisfy both executive leadership and front-line teams?

Ease of use matters too. If agents, analysts, and leaders can’t find value in it quickly, feedback won’t flow where it’s needed most.

Discover the best customer feedback management solutions:

Customer Feedback Management Best Practices

Technology may capture customer sentiment, but it’s what companies do next that separates good intentions from real improvement. At the enterprise level, feedback shapes products, and defines brand reputation, retention, and revenue.

Here’s what the most effective teams get right.

• Track consistently: Feedback isn’t a file to review later. It’s a feed that’s active and ongoing. Companies need to review regularly, discuss in depth, and build around it.
• Make feedback cross functional: Operations needs visibility into service complaints, marketing needs to know where messaging misses, and HR should see how poor feedback is affecting teams. Get everyone involved.
• Close the loop: Replying to feedback, or acting on it, is crucial. Customers want to know their input mattered, and teams want confirmation their fix was felt. Ensure that your action is clear, powerful, and visible.
• Read between the lines: Surveys are useful, but raw behavior can say more. Combine behavioral insights, structured survey data, and conversational analytics for a comprehensive view of what customers really feel, not just what they say.
• Make it easy to act: Help teams fix issues quickly. Check if workflows are in place for feedback routing, and whether CX agents can escalate recurring problems. Give people the tools they need to act.

Customer Feedback Management Trends

Customer expectations haven’t just shifted, they’ve splintered. Channels have multiplied. Responses move faster. The tools used to manage it all are catching up. Here’s what’s defining feedback management right now:

The Rise of AI-Powered Analysis

Enterprise teams spent years circling AI as a concept. Now it’s operational. The strongest feedback systems today don’t just categorize responses, they break them down by tone, urgency, and underlying cause.

Platforms like Medallia, NICE, and Sprinklr are using natural language processing and conversational analytics to surface issues before they mutate. Instead of waiting for quarterly survey analysis, teams can spot sentiment drops and recurring themes as they happen.

Feedback Is Becoming Embedded

Feedback used to live in standalone forms: a survey here, a rating box there. That’s changing. Leading platforms now capture signals from everyday interactions: chat logs, call transcripts, even app usage.

Feedback is moving closer to the moment. A delivery delay triggers a quick prompt. A cancelled subscription opens the door to ask why. Systems are listening all the time, and they’re getting smarter about what to listen for.

Structured Feedback Loses Traction

It’s not just about ticking boxes. The most valuable insights often show up in open comments, social threads, or long-form email replies. That unstructured data used to be hard to sort. Now, it’s where the action is.

Enterprises are investing in platforms that can handle nuance: that can understand sarcasm, spot emotion, and cluster feedback without a human reading every line. Forrester calls this shift “human insight at scale”, and it’s showing up as a core capability in nearly every customer feedback management platform leader.

Everything Connects Or It Doesn’t Work

Feedback is most valuable when it flows. Into support platforms, product roadmaps, agent scripts, and CX dashboards. But that only happens when systems talk to each other.

Leading tools now integrate out-of-the-box with CRMs, contact center systems, VoC platforms, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. That allows customer concerns to influence decision-making across the business, not just in service.

Privacy Remains Crucial

The line between “listening” and “surveilling” is thin, and enterprise buyers know it. In a post-GDPR, opt-out-default world, customer feedback strategies need to include transparency.

That means clear consent prompts. Data handling disclosures. Anonymization features. Especially in regulated sectors, ethics now sit beside analytics in the buyer’s checklist.

What is Customer Feedback Management? The Voice of CX

Customer feedback management It affects product decisions, shapes brand reputation, and drives loyalty at scale.

Done well, it connects dots across departments, from support and sales to marketing and operations. It puts real-time customer truth in front of the people who can do something about it.

But it only works when the systems are connected, the insights are trusted, and the loop is truly closed. That’s why enterprise teams are investing in modern customer feedback management platforms to operationalize input.

For companies focused on loyalty, innovation, and experience, the question isn’t whether to invest in customer feedback tools. The only real question is: which one will help you act faster, and smarter? CX Today is here to help:

• Join the Community: Be part of a dynamic CX-focused network. Swap ideas with thought leaders and elevate your feedback strategy.
• Test the Tech: Discover the top-rated platforms, meet vendors, and explore trends at live and virtual events.
• Plan Your Next Investment: Use our CX Marketplace to explore top vendors in feedback, VoC, CDP, and contact center tech.

Or visit the ultimate CX guide for enterprise experience leaders, for insights into how to build a better CX strategy, one step at a time.

With global enterprises like BT, Deutsche Telekom, and EE already seeing results, the discussion explores how hybrid human-AI teams, composable experience design, and data-driven automation are shaping the contact center of 2026 — and how a unified CX platform can future-proof operations and drive measurable business value.

In this CX Today interview, Rob Scott sits down with Shrenik Jain, VP of Product Management for CCaaS at Sprinklr, to explore what’s next for contact centers and how Sprinklr is taking a platform-first approach to transform customer experience.

Jain explains why Sprinklr didn’t follow the legacy voice-first route, how unification enables smarter AI, and what the shift from assistant AI to agentic AI means for tomorrow’s CX workforce. If you’re rethinking your contact center strategy for 2026, this one’s worth a watch.

Key Discussion Points:

• The real reason CCaaS is saturated: Why traditional cloud migration is no longer enough, and what customers now expect.
• Connected intelligence over channel sprawl: How Sprinklr integrates social, voice, messaging, and AI into a single platform.
• The rise of agentic AI: What moving from reactive assistants to autonomous agents means for skills, roles, and workforce planning.
• Actionable insights, not just dashboards: How AI is shifting from descriptive to prescriptive, and even autonomous decision-making.

To explore Sprinklr’s unified CXM platform and how it enables smarter, scalable, AI-powered customer engagement, visit sprinklr.com

A loyal customer isn’t just someone who comes back. They spend more. Stay longer. Recommend faster. They open emails, tolerate hiccups, and ignore your competitors’ ads. They’re also far cheaper to retain than any lead your sales team is chasing right now.

Loyalty isn’t a lucky break. It’s the outcome of moments that go right consistently, and often quietly. A first experience that flows without friction. A support interaction that resolves more than just the issue. A product that keeps its promise. Each of these moments builds equity in the relationship.

When those touchpoints connect  across teams, systems, and time something stronger than repeat business takes shape. Customers begin to trust. They stick around, not because it’s the easiest option, but because the experience earns it.

What is Customer Loyalty?

Customer loyalty reflects a decision: the conscious choice to stay with a brand when alternatives are just a click away. It’s not just about satisfaction, plenty of satisfied customers churn. Loyalty runs deeper. It’s emotional, earned through consistency, value, and trust built over time.

In practical terms, loyalty shows when customers return after a poor experience, because they believe it’s the exception, not the norm. It shines when existing buyers refer peers, opt into updates, or upgrade without needing a discount.

But for enterprises, this isn’t a soft metric. It’s measurable, in retention rates, customer lifetime value, and referral growth. In fact, increasing customer retention by just 5% can boost profits by 25% to 95% depending on the industry. Loyalty doesn’t just pay off; it compounds.

Now, it matters more than ever. With CX as a key battleground, loyalty becomes a lead indicator of business resilience, and a hedge against rising acquisition costs.

The ROI of Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty used to be a feel-good metric. Now it’s a board-level priority.

Retaining a customer isn’t just cheaper than winning a new one, it’s smarter. The cost of acquisition has spiked over 60% in the last five years, especially across digital channels. Meanwhile, repeat customers spend more, refer faster, and support brands longer, even when things go wrong.

The return is measurable:

• CAC Down, Margins Up: Brands with strong loyalty programs don’t need to outspend rivals on ads. Their customers come back organically. Acquisition costs are up to 7x higher than retention costs, and rising. Loyalty brings those numbers down.
• Predictable Revenue: Returning customers are more consistent. They know the product, trust the brand, and often skip the comparison stage altogether. That makes forecasting easier, pipelines more stable, and marketing spend more efficient.
• Loyalty = Resilience: In downturns, loyal customers stick. They’re more forgiving of glitches and slower to churn. A loyalty strategy isn’t just about growth, it’s about survival when market headwinds hit.
• Better Intelligence: Good loyalty tools are also listening tools. They track not just transactions, but behavior: redemptions, preferences, referrals, and feedback. That kind of data can feed customer journey strategies and help pinpoint why loyalty is rising or falling.
• Cross-Functional Buy-In: Loyalty isn’t a marketing-only game anymore. When programs sync with CRMs and support channels, they empower every team that touches the customer and help break down the silos that usually hurt CX.

What is Customer Loyalty Management?

Loyalty isn’t a byproduct of good service; it’s the result of managing relationships with intent. For enterprises, customer loyalty management is the discipline of designing and maintaining systems that keep the right customers coming back, staying longer, and contributing more value over time.

Loyalty doesn’t come from running rewards programs on cruise control. It starts with clarity; knowing who your most valuable customers are, what keeps them engaged, and how to stand out even when competitors promise more for less.

The best loyalty strategies don’t operate in a silo. They’re part of the broader customer experience engine, connected to feedback, support, product usage, and behavioural cues. Managed well, these strategies turn loyalty into a dynamic input, not just a passive output. It’s not a metric at the end of a funnel, it’s something built and reinforced at every stage of the journey.

Loyalty Management Tools and Platforms

The strongest tools today aren’t just managing point balances or sending birthday emails. They’re helping organizations understand loyalty as a behavior, not a program.

At a basic level, these platforms centralize loyalty data: engagement patterns, redemption activity, repeat purchase signals, and more. But the more advanced systems go further. They apply machine learning to spot early signs of churn, flag disengaged segments, and recommend next-best actions in real time.

What sets the leading loyalty management platforms apart is their ability to fit inside a broader CX tech stack. That means:

• Integrating with CRM to unify customer context
• Connecting to feedback loops for real-time insight
• Embedding in messaging infrastructure like CPaaS to deliver hyper-personalized moments that actually land

Many also support predictive analytics, using behavioral data to calculate loyalty risk scores, tailor rewards dynamically, or prompt human intervention when relationships are at risk.

How to Measure Customer Loyalty

Loyalty isn’t a single number. It’s a pattern, and like most patterns in enterprise CX, it takes a mix of metrics to see the full picture.

Behavioral signals still lead the pack. Metrics like repeat purchase rate, frequency of interaction, average order value, and churn give a direct read on what customers are doing, and where that behavior changes over time.

Behavioural signals often say more than surveys. A customer who slows their spending, skips repeat purchases, or stops logging in is sending a message. Something has shifted, in the experience, the product fit, or the perceived value.

Behaviour tells you what happened. But it won’t tell you why. That’s where customer sentiment comes into play.

Tools like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) dig beneath the surface, giving teams a clearer sense of how customers actually feel about their experience. When behavioural dips show up, they offer the context needed to act fast, and fix the root cause before it costs more.

For many organizations, this layer is captured across touchpoints with VoC tools, then analyzed over time to correlate sentiment with spend or attrition.

What’s changing now is the rise of emotional loyalty metrics. These tools look beyond direct feedback, using conversational analysis, sentiment trends, and inferred emotional cues to understand attachment, not just satisfaction. It’s especially useful for brands competing on experience, not price.

Taken together, these data points create a more reliable model. Not just who’s loyal today, but who’s likely to stay, spend, and advocate tomorrow.

How to Choose Loyalty Management Software

The wrong loyalty platform won’t break a business, but it will stall progress. What looks slick in a demo can crumble under pressure if it can’t sync with existing systems, surface usable insights, or grow with you.

Enterprise teams evaluating loyalty management software need more than a feature checklist. They need to know how the tool will hold up six months in, with multiple departments relying on it.

Here’s what separates the useful from the disruptive:

True Integration

No platform works in isolation. If loyalty data sits in a separate bucket from customer service, CRM, or analytics tools, there’s a problem.

That means:

• Real-time syncing with CRM systems
• Alignment with VoC platforms
• Integrations with Business intelligence solutions

Most loyalty management platforms also seamlessly connect with CCaaS platforms, conversational analytics tools, and ERP software.

Dashboards That Get Used

Too many platforms surface metrics. Fewer tell you what they mean.

The strongest systems flag what matters: declining engagement from a once-loyal segment, a regional drop in redemption rates, churn triggers hiding in feedback. Ideally, these insights feed into broader customer intelligence tools.

Ask the vendor: When loyalty starts to dip, how will your platform show it, and who will know?

Scalability

Will it handle loyalty across multiple brands? Markets? Languages? Can it adapt to tiered models, emotional loyalty, partner programs?

Look for:

• Configurable logic, not hard-coded structures
• Clean admin interfaces for rule management
• Role-based controls that keep compliance teams comfortable

If it takes a developer to adjust a points rule, it’s not enterprise-ready.

Discover who’s driving results in the loyalty management software market here:

Best Practices for Improving Customer Loyalty

Loyalty doesn’t just emerge from a points program or a fun campaign. For enterprises, it’s a byproduct of consistent, intentional experience design, built into service flows, product strategy, data models, and frontline decision-making.

Build Feedback Loops That Actually Close

The fastest way to erode loyalty? Ignoring input – or worse, asking for it and doing nothing.

Instead of measuring feedback volume, measure action: How many product updates were driven by complaints? How often are support teams looped in to resolve themes emerging from surveys? Connect your loyalty program to customer feedback management tools that can drive real changes, not just reporting.

Use Tiering: But Don’t Let It Turn Transactional

Tiered loyalty still has its place, but only when it’s designed with purpose. Value shouldn’t just reflect spend. It should acknowledge engagement in all its forms. Early adopters, advocates, testers, even those who provide consistent feedback – they’re all part of the loyalty equation.

In B2B especially, tiers work best when they reflect mutual success. Think retention milestones, shared KPIs, or collaborative innovation, not just contract size.

Let AI Do More Than Segment

Yes, AI can slice customer cohorts faster. But real value comes when it flags what’s slipping before it shows up in churn.

Modern loyalty management tools increasingly come with predictive features: surfacing customers at risk of disengagement, nudging reps to check in, or adjusting loyalty offers based on sentiment and behavior patterns. Don’t just use AI to automate, use it to alert.

Tie Service Quality to Loyalty Outcomes

When loyalty starts to dip, it’s often not marketing’s fault, it’s a missed service expectation, or a support gap that never got escalated.

Bring loyalty and service metrics closer together. Track whether NPS dips after a long resolution time. Monitor whether loyalty program members get faster assistance, and whether that’s noticed.

Reward the Behavior You Want More Of

Discounts create habits, and not always good ones. If you reward spend alone, you build deal-seekers, not advocates.

Instead, reward the moments that drive growth:

• Referrals
• Feedback submitted
• Community contributions
• Self-service engagement
• Event participation

Loyalty isn’t a transaction, it’s a signal. Recognize the signals that drive real business value.

Localize Where It Matters

For multinational brands, loyalty can’t be global by default. Preferences shift by market, so should campaigns.

Consider:

• Local holiday-based promotions
• Regional tier naming conventions
• Local influencers or ambassadors

Global strategy. Local flavor. That balance keeps loyalty human.

Customer Loyalty Management + Service: The Critical Link

Loyalty doesn’t just live in a dashboard or a rewards app. It’s won or lost in moments that often feel small: a delivery delay, a billing dispute, a misunderstood policy. The way a brand responds in these moments is often more influential than any discount or points tier.

And that makes customer service a cornerstone of customer loyalty management.

When Service Is Seamless, Loyalty Feels Earned

Customers don’t demand flawlessness. But they do expect clarity, speed, and respect when things go wrong. Loyalty isn’t tested during moments of delight, it’s tested when something breaks. Support teams who can see a customer’s history, loyalty status, and previous interactions don’t just fix problems faster. They solve them with more context, more care, and often, more impact.

This is where integration matters:

• CRM systems should surface loyalty data
• CPaaS platforms can enable proactive outreach
• Ticketing systems can reflect VIP status or churn risk

Proactive Service = Preventative Loyalty Loss

The best loyalty moves aren’t reactive. They’re invisible, because the problem was handled before the customer noticed.

For example:

• Flagging shipping delays and sending apologies before the complaint
• Alerting high-value customers when products they love are low in stock
• Following up after negative sentiment is detected in chatbot interactions

This requires orchestration. But the payoff is reduced escalation volume, increased trust, and loyalty built on more than transactions.

Empower Agents Like They’re Brand Ambassadors

Loyalty lives or dies with the agent experience. If the frontline team feels unsupported, overworked, or stuck with legacy tools, they can’t deliver the kind of service that loyalty depends on.

Modern workforce engagement platforms are helping here, giving agents better training, clearer knowledge bases, and visibility into customer journeys. This isn’t just an ops upgrade, it’s a loyalty investment.

Customer Loyalty Management Trends to Watch

Enterprise loyalty strategies evolve with the customer, and the customer continues to change.

Over the past two years, loyalty has shifted from tactical marketing add-on to boardroom-level priority. Why? Because retention has become the fastest route to stable revenue.

Here’s what’s changing right now.

• Loyalty Is Getting Smarter: Rather than shouting about rewards, top brands are building invisible loyalty, systems that work behind the scenes, adjusting experiences based on behavior, purchase history, and product use. The loyalty isn’t in the point balance. It’s in the recognition. AI and predictive analytics are playing a bigger role here, helping teams act on churn signals before the customer ever says a word.
• Emotional Loyalty Takes the Lead: Price cuts don’t build loyalty. They build expectations. Enterprise buyers are shifting from transactional incentives to emotional loyalty strategies, things like exclusive experiences, consistent service, and values-based alignment. In B2B markets, that might look like strategic co-development, VIP access to product roadmaps, or account-based reward systems.
• Loyalty Hardwired Into CX: The strongest loyalty programs don’t operate in isolation. They’re woven into the wider customer experience stack, touching CRM, CPaaS, contact center platforms, and data systems. This allows brands to reward customers in real time, based on meaningful actions, not just spend.
• Consent-First Design: The days of collecting data “because we can” are over. Modern loyalty programs are being rebuilt around trust and transparency. That means clear value exchanges, upfront permissions, and control for the customer. Loyalty is no longer about how much data you can gather, it’s about how responsibly you use what you have.

Customer Loyalty Management Beyond the Transaction

Customer loyalty isn’t a finish line. It’s an ongoing, intentional outcome earned across every interaction, reinforced with every decision, and protected by every system put in place.

For enterprise teams, managing that loyalty means more than launching a rewards program. Managing loyalty well means making it easier for customers to stay than to leave. That’s not about discounts or perks, it’s about designing experiences that feel effortless, relevant, and personal.

Whether the goal is improving retention, boosting lifetime value, or gaining a clearer view of customer behaviour, the right strategy starts with the right tools, and the right insights.

CX Today offers a range of resources to help enterprise teams build loyalty systems that actually move the needle:

• Explore the Marketplace: Compare top loyalty management vendors with features tailored for growth, data integration, and security at scale.
• Join the Community: Learn how CX and marketing leaders across industries are evolving loyalty strategies in the CX Community.
• Track What’s Changing: Follow new developments in AI-powered loyalty, cross-channel experience design, and customer journey intelligence with research reports.

See how loyalty fits into the broader CX ecosystem. Visit our Ultimate CX Guide for a practical deep dive into the people, platforms, and processes driving customer-led growth.

Most companies know customer experience (CX) remains more than a feel-good initiative, it’s central to strategy. Companies strong in CX enjoy up to 80 % faster revenue growth, 60% higher profits, and better retention rates. Workflow automation can amplify those returns.

Already, 60% of organizations report achieving ROI within 12 months of deployment of an AI deployment, alongside 25–30 % boosts in productivity, error reductions of 40–75%. Some even show 15–35 % increases in employee satisfaction when routine tasks are offloaded. It’s clear automation pays off, enterprises just need to know what to measure.

The Three Pillars of Workflow Automation ROI

There are hundreds of case studies sharing insights into potential automation ROI. Some focus on efficiency gains and reduced time to resolution, like Vonage, that reduced average response rates from four days to four hours. Others concentrate on new revenue, like Simba, which unlocked £600k of extra monthly revenue with AI automated sales processes.

It’s also worth noting how much can be lost by delay. NiCE’s AI Value Calculator, based on billions of anonymized customer interactions, makes it clear that the cost of not investing in automation could be higher than most companies realize.

Usually though, the biggest results fall into three categories:

• Customer ROI: Audience growth, loyalty, and satisfaction. Automation can be a multiplier for conversion, proactive engagement, and longer-lasting relationships.
• Efficiency ROI: Faster resolution, fewer repetitive tasks, and reallocated human capital are tangible sources of cost reduction and improved productivity.
• Risk ROI: Consistent standards, compliance, trust, and automation guardrails deliver powerful returns by preventing losses, fines, and reputational blowback.

Customer ROI: Growth, Retention, Satisfaction

When boardrooms ask whether automation is worth the spend, customer impact is the first test. Workflow automation ROI is most convincing when aligns with movement in satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue. Faster service, proactive engagement, and fewer friction points directly shape whether customers buy again, or leave.

Fortunately, there’s no shortage of evidence that automation positively impacts CX. Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study of Kustomer’s CX platform reported a 422% ROI over three years. The study found service costs fell by 88%, while agent productivity climbed 50%. Reduced churn and faster responses combined to boost satisfaction scores at scale.

Elsewhere, retail company Loop Earplugs used Ada’s AI and automation platform to achieve a 357% ROI, driven mostly by faster response times. First response rates improved by 194.52%, and the company’s average CSAT score grew to 80.

Even highly regulated sectors are seeing the effect. In banking, conversational AI deployments delivered 250–400% ROI over three years, with proactive outreach reducing inquiries by 43% and satisfaction scores rising 22%.

The ROI of automation from a customer experience perspective doesn’t just come from fast responses or preventing churn either. Solutions like NiCE’s proactive AI Agent, which reaches out to “silent customers” before they abandon purchases or subscriptions, helps to recover otherwise lost revenue.

Efficiency ROI: Opex, Speed, Employee Experience

While customer outcomes get headlines,the economics of automation are often where investment decisions are won. The workflow automation ROI story in efficiency terms is straightforward: lower operating costs, faster resolution times, and stronger employee performance without necessarily reducing headcount.

Consider the impact of orchestration at scale. A Total Economic Impact study of Camunda found a 408% return over three years, translating into more than $112 million in net savings for a composite enterprise. These savings came from streamlining complex workflows, cutting redundant processes, and enabling faster time-to-market for new services.

With Salesforce and Agentforce automation, the Formula One team increased first-call resolution rates to over 95%, so teams had more time to focus on high-value tasks. Frontier Airlines used Cognigy to automate 800k conversations a month, allowing for a 15-30% growth rate without investing in extra headcount.

The efficiency pillar extends to people too, the ROI from improved engagement and decreased churn. Capgemini’s 2025 customer service research found 73% of agents report fewer repetitive tasks after AI-based automation adoption, while 70% say their overall workload has decreased.

NICE highlights similar gains with its automation suite, where routine admin tasks are stripped from daily workloads, and scheduling platforms like Playvox enable global teams to manage shifts more effectively. MongoDB, for instance, abandoned spreadsheets in favor of NICE’s Playvox, improving scheduling accuracy and boosting morale across its 24/7 technical support teams.

Risk ROI: Compliance, Continuity, Governance

The third pillar of workflow automation ROI is less visible in day-to-day operations but no less critical. Risk reduction often shows its value in what doesn’t happen: fines avoided, crises prevented, and reputations preserved. Boards and compliance leaders see these outcomes as material returns, even if they appear in the “cost avoided” column.

The risks of not investing are serious. In 2025, scammers hijacked a United Airlines customer support line, tricking a passenger into transferring $17,000. Automating verification processes, and enabling real-time security checks might have prevented that.

AWS’s Verafin solution shows how AI can be deployed for compliance investigations, cutting review times from days to seconds. For financial institutions, that level of speed does more than increase efficiency, it reduces the window of exposure, ensuring fraud or error is intercepted before damage accumulates.

From a workflow TCO perspective, the ability to scale without scaling exposure is invaluable. Fines from GDPR violations can reach up to 4% of annual global turnover; data breaches in regulated sectors can cost millions per incident. Risk ROI reframes automation as an insurance policy – one that protects brand equity as much as it protects the balance sheet.

Another risk deflected by workflow automation is the loss of expertise. As turnover rates continue to skyrocket, automation reduces reliance on scarce skills, and frees up more human time. Just look at Elanco, it reduced time spent on routine tasks with Google Gemini, saved $2.3 million in the first year with process efficiencies, and reduced the demand for extra team members.

How to Calculate True Workflow Automation ROI

Boards rarely sign off on technology spend without a clear model for value. The challenge with automation is that benefits are distributed across departments and often accrue over time. A disciplined framework for calculating the ROI of automation is therefore essential.

• Establish the Baseline: Every calculation begins with today’s reality. Measure current volumes, handle times, first-contact resolution, containment rates, and cost per interaction. Without this baseline, improvements risk being anecdotal.
• Define Automation Scope: Not all processes deliver equal value when automated. High-volume, repetitive, or compliance-sensitive workflows are usually the best candidates. Generic automation isn’t the best way to achieve higher ROI.
• Model Efficiency Gains: Here, the focus is on operational savings: Reduced time-to-resolution (TTR), Lower average handle time (AHT), Fewer escalations requiring senior staff. For CFOs, these metrics can be translated into improved customer lifetime value and higher retention revenue.
• Include Employee Experience Savings: Attrition is an overlooked line item. If automation helps reduce repetitive tasks and improve employee experiences, it will have a direct impact on your operating costs.
• Compare Against Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Every model must weigh benefits against the Workflow TCO: software licenses, integration, training, and change management. Automation vendors increasingly support these calculations with ROI tools, but validate assumptions.

Finally, place the numbers on a timeline. Forrester and BCG studies suggest most enterprises see payback within 12–18 months, with ROI accelerating as AI scales and learns.

Turning Automation ROI from Theory into Evidence

Boards are asking a simple question: Does automation pay? The answer is yes, when it’s measured the right way. The three pillars of workflow automation ROI: customer impact, efficiency, and risk reduction, show that value clearly. Faster service wins loyalty, streamlined processes lower costs, and guardrails reduce exposure.

The real cost lies in waiting. Every unresolved case or manual process represents money left on the table. The practical next step is simple: identify high-value workflows, run pilots, and track outcomes against workflow TCO. The organizations that prove value fastest will be the ones setting the pace in customer experience.

The problem is simple: systems don’t talk to each other. A customer starts a conversation on live chat, calls later to follow up, and then gets an email with conflicting information. Each hand-off forces them to repeat details, re-authenticate, or explain the issue all over again. Patience runs out quickly.

The cost isn’t hidden for long. U.S. companies lose an estimated $136.8 billion every year to avoidable churn. Customers leave when systems don’t connect, data is trapped in silos, workflows run in isolation, and departments push their own priorities instead of working toward the full journey.

Fixing that takes more than patches. It needs stronger journey orchestration, along with omnichannel workflow design and dependable CDP integration. The aim is for every channel to draw from the same source of truth, so the customer isn’t forced to start over at each step.

Fragmented Journeys: The Hidden Cost and Causes

The cost of fragmented customer journeys isn’t always obvious. Customers don’t usually complain about “systems not talking to each other.” They just get tired of repeating themselves, chasing updates, or being bounced between departments. Some walk away silently. Others switch to a competitor after one poor experience. That lost loyalty is expensive.

All the while, customers that get connected experiences are helping brands grow. Studies show customers who get “excellent” experiences spend about 140% more.

The Causes of Fragmented Customer Journeys

Why are fragmented customer journeys still getting worse? A big part of the answer lies in the systems. Older ERP platforms were built for accounting and operations. They store useful data, but they weren’t designed to share it across customer touchpoints.

On top of that, many firms still run sales, service, and fulfillment on different platforms. Each team shapes processes around its own system, so when customers move between departments, the context often gets lost.

Then there are issues created by:

• Multiple versions of the same customer: Without solid CDP integration, one person might exist in several databases under different IDs. That makes personalization, and even basic service, harder.
• Channels that don’t connect: Phone, email, chat, apps, and stores often sit on different platforms. Customers expect one conversation. Businesses deliver five.
• Processes that drift: Marketing offers a refund or discount, but the policy never makes it to the billing system. Customers get conflicting answers depending on who they ask.
• Automation in silos: Generic automation often backfires. A bot that can’t see the full journey adds more friction, not less.
• Slow-moving data: By the time an update syncs between systems, the customer has already called back.
• Compliance barriers: Privacy and security rules matter, but poor design can block the very context agents need to help.

Taken together, these gaps explain why customers feel let down. The business may see good metrics in one channel, but the overall journey tells another story. Until the foundation is fixed, journey orchestration and omnichannel workflow automation tools can only go so far.

Unifying Journeys: The Journey Orchestration Tech Teams Need

When customers say they feel like they’re dealing with “five different companies at once,” it’s rarely the fault of the service team. The problem sits in the systems. Fixing fragmented customer journeys means building a stack where data flows from the back office to the front line without friction.

Cloud ERP Integration

Most ERPs were built to balance books and manage inventory. They weren’t built to answer a customer who asks, “Where’s my order?” That’s why cloud ERP integration is now so important. When ERP data is connected directly to sales and service platforms, answers come back in seconds instead of days.

Cloud ERP changes that. By connecting ERP directly with CRM and service systems, data is available in real time. Smarter Furnishings made this upgrade with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and reduced quote turnaround times by 80 percent. That kind of improvement comes from eliminating the delays caused by disconnected back-office systems

CDP Integration

Most companies hold records with multiple versions of the same customer. A single person might appear in the marketing database, the CRM, and the billing platform under slightly different records. This duplication makes personalization impossible and creates obvious gaps in service.

A customer data platform (CDP) takes scattered records and pulls them into one profile. It updates as new information comes in, so teams aren’t working from old or conflicting data. That single view makes it possible to keep the journey consistent when a customer moves from one channel to another. With CDP integration, journey orchestration tools have a reliable record to draw on instead of piecing together fragments.

Combining Customer Journey Orchestration and AI Decisioning

The orchestration layer is where data turns into action. Journey orchestration engines like the industry-first solution from NiCE take context from CDPs, CRM systems, and ERPs, and use it to determine the next best step in the customer’s journey. That may mean routing a case to the right team, sending a proactive update, or triggering an RPA process in the background.

Qualtrics research shows that effective orchestration can boost revenue by 10–20 percent while reducing service costs by 15–25 percent At FedPoint, NiCE CXone drove similar results in practice: IVR containment increased from 28.5% to 33.9%, customer satisfaction rose to 98.35%, and average answer speed fell from 35 seconds to 15 seconds.

Omnichannel CCaaS

Customers don’t think in terms of “channels.” They expect one continuous conversation, whether they start with a phone call, follow up via chat, or receive an email confirmation later. Without a unified contact platform, those experiences quickly fracture.

That’s why omnichannel workflow through contact center as a service (CCaaS) is now a priority. BankUnited’s deployment with Talkdesk shows the results: self-service adoption increased by 16%, abandonment fell to 5.3%, and NPS more than doubled.

Automation and CRM Intelligence

Even with orchestration in play, journeys can stall if the back office is still running on manual tasks. That’s where RPA comes in. It takes on work like refunds, policy checks, and updates, jobs that would otherwise create delays and frustration.

On the front line, CRM automation does the heavy lifting for agents. AI creates summaries automatically, enriches profiles with data, and shares recommendations with agents in real time. The agent spends less time searching and more time solving. That combination speeds up resolution and helps ensure the journey doesn’t break in the final mile.

How to Start Reducing Journey Fragmentation

There isn’t a quick fix for fragmented customer journeys. The organizations that succeed usually take it step by step. They get the basics right, test in a few focused areas, and only then expand.

• Begin with the data: If core systems don’t share information, the journey will eventually break. That’s why so many CIOs are prioritizing ERP and CRM integration, or even tying in CDP solutions, before layering on orchestration.
• Create a single customer profile: A CDP integration pulls records together from sales, marketing, and service. It means every interaction draws from the same source of truth. Without that, different teams are still working off different stories.
• Pilot orchestration on high-value journeys: Trying to orchestrate everything at once rarely works. Pick a few critical touchpoints, like order tracking or benefit enrollment, and build orchestration around them. A Middle Eastern bank did this with Kore.ai, and eventually achieved 40% automation rates for workflows, as well as higher CSAT scores.
• Add omnichannel contact. Customers don’t think in terms of “phone” or “chat.” They want one continuous conversation. Moving to CCaaS platforms helps deliver that. Particularly when those systems can speak to ERP, CRM, and CDP solutions.
• Automate the back office. Journeys still fail when refunds or approvals sit in manual queues. RPA can process these instantly, while CRM automation gives agents context without the need to dig. Together, they prevent small delays from becoming big frustrations.

Also, measure what matters. Efficiency metrics only go so far. Average handle time may look good on a report but say little about customer loyalty. Outcome-based measures – resolution rates, effort scores, verified completions, tell you whether fragmentation is actually being reduced.

Journey Orchestration: From Fragmentation to Flow

Plenty of firms talk about improving customer experience. The real progress comes from those willing to confront fragmentation directly. They modernize their data foundations, connect ERP and CRM, put CDP integration in place, and then add journey orchestration and omnichannel workflows. Each layer builds on the last, creating a system that actually holds together.

The rewards are measurable. Containment improves without hurting satisfaction. Resolution times drop. Customers stop repeating themselves at every turn. Plus, loyalty grows stronger, the ultimate measure of success in competitive markets where switching costs are low and alternatives are one click away.

Journey orchestration is only going to matter more as AI takes on a bigger role in customer experience. But AI that runs on inconsistent data won’t deliver. Reducing fragmentation is the first step. Once that’s done, journeys become faster, cheaper to support, and more likely to end in loyalty instead of churn.

Whether through phone, chat, SMS, or social media, the assumption is simple: if you’re not available, a competitor will be.  

For modern contact centers, that expectation is both a challenge and an opportunity. Omnichannel engagement, intelligent IVR, real-time customer satisfaction surveys, and seamless CRM integration are no longer optional; they are now the tools that define competitive service.  

The cost of failing to meet these expectations is tangible. Missed calls aren’t just lost opportunities; they erode trust.  

“If you’re reachable, you’re in the game,” says James Scott, Senior Solutions Engineer for North America at Diabolocom.  

“You miss 100 percent of the calls you don’t answer. That’s not just about revenue; it’s about long-term trust.” 

“If a call doesn’t reach the right person quickly, it erodes the relationship.”  

Defining Reachability  

But what does reachability actually mean?  

For Scott, reachability is the ability of an agent or a client to connect quickly and meaningfully.  

It’s not as simple as just getting someone on a call; it’s about enabling them to achieve the purpose of that interaction.  

“For a sales call, that might be initiating the sales process efficiently. For customer service, it delivers the high-quality care the client expects,” he explained.   

For the modern agent, reachability means no longer being tied to a desk. Customers expect real-time service, and organizations must meet these expectations.  

This is where tools like Diabolocom Mobile – the industry’s first app-free mobile CX solution – are crucial, as they allow agents and field service staff to handle calls from anywhere.  

“The shift from on-prem to cloud-based contact centers was the first step,” says Scott.   

“Mobile takes it further: what if agents could leave the contact center entirely and still be reachable, still be able to connect with clients effectively?” 

And the solution isn’t limited to improving pick-up rates. With Diabolocom Mobile, mobile phones become complete CX tools, allowing agents to log interactions, update CRMs, and automate follow-ups.  

Indeed, Diabolocom’s mantra is that mobility doesn’t compromise quality, rather it enhances it.  

The tool integrates with all major CRM systems, giving agents the context they need to respond effectively. 

Improving Reachability  

In addition to Diabolocom Mobile, there are plenty of other solutions that can be deployed to improve reachability.  

Diabolocom’s Engage platform, for example, uses Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) to direct calls to the right agent immediately. 

The benefits of this feature can be seen in practice with its implementation for Cordon Group, one of Europe’s leading players in the electronics sector. 

The firm operates a call center that receives over 100,000 calls per year. In 2023, Cordon Group introduced Diabolocom’s ACD solution to route incoming calls according to the agent’s skill level. 

This proved to be a great success, with the company’s Quality of Service (the rate at which incoming calls are picked up) averaging 91% for 2023. 

Cordon Group also achieved a reachability rate of 98%, well above expected averages, for outgoing calls made manually from the Diabolocom platform. 

As well as ACD, the CCaaS provider also delivers actionable insights via real-time dashboards, which highlight queue statuses, waiting times, and service levels, with alerts that flag issues before they escalate.   

“These live insights aren’t just metrics; they’re actionable intelligence,” Scott says.  

“They help companies protect the customer experience and maintain high standards, even during peak periods.” 

Brink’s France is a good example of how that feature can benefit a business: 

“We use all the possibilities offered by Diabolocom – from the voice server to post-call satisfaction surveys and real-time indicators – to automate what can be automated and provide supervisors with a complete view of activity,” explained François-Xavier Schepereel, Customer Relations Director for Brink’s France. 

Virtual numbers also play a key role. By offering local, national, or international numbers, businesses gain a sense of presence where it matters most, improving pickup rates and ensuring consistent reachability.  

Frédéric Durand, CEO of Diabolocom, notes:  

“Virtual numbers let your teams operate independently of physical locations. You can centralize management, track performance, and maintain service continuity seamlessly.”  

AI and the Future of Reachability  

Looking ahead, AI is unsurprisingly key to shaping the next level of reachability.  

Intelligent virtual agents can handle first-line interactions 24/7 across multiple channels, freeing humans for complex or high-value conversations.  

Scott detailed how reachability is evolving from just getting a human on the line to ensuring intelligent agents deliver high-quality service at scale.  

“The challenge is to keep humans in the loop where they matter most, but leverage AI where it can act effectively,” he said.   

Why Reachability Matters  

For enterprises, reachability cannot be ignored. It has the potential to drive revenue, build trust, and strengthen loyalty.  

“In a saturated market, your technology has to do what it says it does,” Scott explains.  

“If it delivers on its promise, it separates the wheat from the chaff – and that’s what gives businesses an edge.” 

By combining mobility, intelligent routing, AI, real-time monitoring, and virtual numbers, contact centers can build a system that never misses a customer.  

You can find out more about Diabolocom’s Mobile solution and how it is helping organizations master reachability by checking out this article.

You can also discover Diabolocom’s full suite of services and solutions by visiting the website today.