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.   

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.

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.

At London’s annual Call and Contact Centre Expo, the telecommunications company revealed how its customer-centric approach to limit consumer frustration has improved its overall loyalty.  

This solution is aligned with Vodafone’s strategy to transform customer experience. 

Customer experience results have been improved since the strategy launch in July 2025, with 9 out of 15 of its markets leading with this new strategy, resulting in a six percent reduction in company detraction after the first few months. 

When first researching customer experience strategies, Vodafone discovered that seamless interactions were a high priority for customers, with frequent causes of company detraction relating to negative customer experiences. 

These incidences included: holding for additional agents, transferring calls, repeated conversations, and a company’s failure to keep promises. 

In fact, they had discovered that customers who had experienced at least one bad experience from customer service were 4 times more likely to abandon the company. 

Melda Sofuoglu, Global Senior CX and Service Excellence Senior Manager at Vodafone, explained how the customer expectations have grown since the rise of AI in the CX space:

“We are operating in a rapidly changing industry – expectations have grown to 24/7 service.” 

However, research revealed that as long as customer interactions remained seamless, then customers would be more likely to remain with a company that avoided friction. 

And when companies failed to deliver on results, 46% of customers would research Google to find answers to their issues, driving enterprise intensity to produce better results as customers discover what sets the bar in the CX space. 

Just Ask Once

Vodafone has since researched some of the leading customer services spaces online, including Google and Octopus, to take elements and utilize the most productive strategy for resolving customer complaints. 

The strategy, known as ‘Just Ask Once’, began in 2024 to target pain points in the company’s Albania market, with the aim of resolving a customer issue after just one interaction. 

This strategy utilized generative AI omnichannel service to avoid customers re-explaining issues and call waiting times to resolve queries, whilst also keeping customers in the loop if issues cannot be solved immediately to avoid confusion or miscommunication via text. 

This is also done by deploying Vodafone’s suite of capabilities, such as Super-TOBi, a generative AI assistant that handles complex conversations and queries in comparison to the standatd TOBi chat bot. 

This strategy, however, is not designed to elminate human agents from the mix, but rather to place them at the center of this strategy with chat bots as a second option during traffic spikes, with many of these queries being completed through human agents rather than bots to avoid frustration. 

These bots simply allow agents to complete Vodafone’s vision for setting the new standard for customer experience centered around meaningful interactions and added loyalty, even when mistakes occur. 

This has involved significant investments in human agent training to keep them adapted and involved in the consistently changing state of customer experience, rather than eliminating their positions for AI-only service. 

However, Vodafone has experienced setbacks in this strategy amongst social media responses. 

Aimie Jago, Global Senior CX and Service Excellence Senior Manager at Vodafone, explained how the company are managing the influx from social media:

“In some markets we see some backlash on social media – its more about previous customer experience through chat bots.” 

Resolving past customer interactions remains challenging for Vodafone, arguing that to tackle this previous frustration into returned loyalty they need to experience this new transformation. 

This has affected the company’s ROI after significant investments; however, they are expecting to receive this once business case justification takes place. 

Furthermore, Vodafone’s continues to remain vulnerable, as this strategy depends primarily on technology, investment, and strong sponsorship, due to its small space within the CX space.  

Today, this strategy is being implemented by Vodafone’s global markets, aiming to champion the voice of the customer by creating a strong customer community, available to customers through the Vodafone app. 

At Microsoft Ignite 2025, the tech giant announced its plans to transform how it implements AI and how to improve general productivity. 

Microsoft has offered various AI agents for specific systems and companies for personalized success. 

Microsoft Copilot 365 

Within Office 365, Copilot acts as an assistant to support teams in preparing and managing their communications smoothly, working separately across each application to reduce overall preparation times. 

In Outlook, Copilot can organize a user’s inbox from high volumes of emails to summarized and highlighted information that needs immediate attention, as well as gather any information relevant to the user’s current task for quick response times and correct information gathered. 

In Word, customers can utilize Copilot’s assistance with drafting and refining content, providing summarized notes of material, and lengthening notes into documents, allowing teams to prepare for meetings and reports with limited information. 

In PowerPoint, users can create highly efficient presentations through Copilot’s capabilities to develop slides, draft content, and reposition information to fit their audience’s needs, allowing for clearer presentations with effective outcomes. 

In Excel, Copilot can break down data information through summaries and identify common trends within the spreadsheet, allowing for quick turnarounds in analysis explanations for other customers or employees. 

Copilot Studio

Within Copilot studio, teams can design personalized agents to fit their needs to work inside Microsoft 365. 

This tool can be used support connections between Microsoft’s own content as well as external systems through APIs, meaning customers can utilize the agent outside of Microsoft’s products for quicker results. 

It offers natural language when advising users on tasks, queries, or support with internal workflows and repeatable tasks, minimizing the need for human agent automation. 

For additional security, Copilot studio allows users to manage their custom agents to reassign roles to fit company policies, permissions, and security maintenance, obtaining an Entra Agent ID to verify an agent to operate under secure governance. 

Copilot Mode with Edge 

Copilot Mode can now be used on Microsoft Edge to analyze open tabs to summarize content and research within a browser. 

This reduces time spent tab switching and helps users stay on task by feeding them the relevant information. 

Information can be obtained from articles, texts, and videos, summarizing key points and explanations by interpreting knowledge from different sources at the same time, which can be useful for reviewing widespread customer experiences of products or services. 

Copilot Mode is only entitled to utilize information the user gives it access to, allowing the tool to work within company guidelines and provides the user with the relevant information it receives. 

Agent 365 – provides security and governance for copilot (link back to previous article) (100) 

Working as Copilot’s governance layer, Agent 365 provides organizations with the ability to control AI agents and how they interact within the business. 

Agent 365 utilizes Entra ID to identify each agent within an ecosystem and aligns it with company policies, allowing organizations to set limits and permissions when needed to stop agents from working outside company expectations. 

These tools also allow companies to track AI activity to apply compliance rules to avoid data loss on behalf of the agent, allowing organizations to maintain control while the AI agents continue to complete their tasks.  

Copilot Business 

Working as a slightly different version of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Business is designed to support small to mid-sized organizations using AI tools. 

Similarly to the 365 Copilot tool, this feature allows businesses to summarize their material, advise on email management, and create presentations using the provided Microsoft 365 apps to reduce time spent on administrative tasks. 

This tool, however, does not require a complex setup as the needs required for SMB don’t necessarily demand the amount of compliance and data needs to function. 

Copilot Business can but used to work at a basic level, whilst continuing to provide analysis and reports of data and communications to increase productivity within smaller businesses. 

Microsoft Ignite 2025 

Microsoft Ignite will run from Tuesday 18th November to Friday 21st November in San Francisco. 

The company has emphasized its commitment to agentic AI and is set to showcase this message throughout the conference, as well as further touch on issues such as Security and Governance, and Identity and Access. 

The AI startup will allow UJET to continue its AI roadmap for enhanced customer service solutions. 

This partnership will also address customer data analysis issues for UJET’s enterprise customers. 

This acquisition is set to further UJET’s AI roadmap vision by bolstering the company’s AI capabilities and addressing customer experience concerns. 

By highlighting these issues of visibility between customer and leader, organizations will be able to improve their customer issues before they reach escalation. 

In fact, UJET has reported that organizations that are unaware of these individual customer problems are losing approximately $5MN-$30MN in customer churn revenue. 

This can be linked to ignored or forgotten negative customer experience complaints, with organizations reportedly gathering only five percent of reported customer issues. 

According to UJET CEO, Vasili Triant, customer churn remains a blind spot for many enterprises, arguing that customer interaction analysis is not done effectively. 

He said: “Most companies can’t analyze interaction data at scale, leaving many common customer issues in the dark.” 

However, this acquisition provides enterprises the capabilities to view all customer conversations through unifying collected data. 

He added: 

“UJET’s acquisition of Spiral will provide businesses with a unified view of all customer conversations for more proactive, personalized service.”

This will also help enterprises locate blind spots in other areas of the business, such as product, other services, and the company itself. 

In conversation with CX Today, UJET VP Product Marketer, Matthew Clare, highlighted how other areas of companies can utilize this tool to understand their customers’ needs:

“This could be used by product teams to understand product and service issues – by marketing teams who want to understand what customers are saying about campaigns that are running.” 

Spiral’s AI Product 

Spiral is an AI startup specializing in conversational analytics to improve customer experience data. 

By leveraging AI, Spiral can be used to analyze customer interactions at scale to uncover pain points in customer experience, whilst also offering proactive recommendations to enterprises. 

The product can also be used to analyze various customer conversations across voice and chat channels, the internet, online reviews and surveys, and social media. 

Clare stated: “Anywhere customer conversations happen is a data source for this product.” 

Furthermore, this tool can be used to ask questions about customer churning and how enterprises can respond to these results through predictions to improve future customer experiences. 

“They are trying to solve the problems of customer conversations and customer feedback being spread across different teams and organizations,” he said. 

“How do you not only unify data but bring it together in a way that anyone in the organization can run deep research with a simple conversational AI agent?” 

This acquisition allows UJET to strengthen its status as a prominent CCaaS platform provider and offer customers an improved version of what is already available. 

Clare explained that the purchase will extend “UJET’s reach and gives us the ability to sell Conversational Analytics over the top of any Contact Center and CX software that may be in place, without having us need to position our end to end CCaaS platform.”

For Spiral, this acquisition will allow them to continue providing conversational intelligence alongside UJET’s AI service capabilities, rebranding as Spiral by UJET. 

Elena Zhizhimontova, Founder and CEO of Spiral, discussed how the acquisition will allow them to prioritize a customer-focused plan and continue to improve customer outcomes for a wider enterprise range. 

She said: “We built Spiral to take millions of customer conversations and turn them into clear, actionable insight,”  

“By combining Spiral’s AI with UJET’s cutting-edge CCaaS platform for modern-day customer service, Spiral by UJET will continue as the focused product our customers rely on, now with a more CX-driven roadmap and deeper integrations. 

“Together we can shine a brighter light on customer issues for more organizations worldwide, giving brands the clarity they need to spot issues sooner, address problems faster, and create better products, services, and experiences over the long term.”

Customer Feedback

This partnership will allow current and future customers of UJET to experience Spiral’s product integrally by improving its overall AI and product organization. 

Turo, a long-term customer of both UJET and Spiral, has reaped the benefits of both these companies’ approaches to solving customer issues, as well as having collaborated on a program with Spiral to improve its data collection method. 

Julie Weingardt, Chief Operations Officer at Turo, emphasized how both companies have enabled them to receive customer experience resolutions with reduced friction. 

She said: “Spiral’s AI transformed our approach and helped us build a Voice of the Customer program that is smart and strategic, by capturing structured feedback during the support journey.  

“Spiral AI’s platform allows us to analyze customer conversations and commentary, pinpointing areas where we can improve proactively. 

“We’ve used these insights to refine our self-service options, hone our knowledge base, and help better guide quality agent responses.”

Despite the acquisition, Spiral has confirmed that it will continue to work with its existing customers and products however with UJET integrations.

Spiral was acquired by UJET for an undisclosed amount.

The update puts unification at the forefront. Addressing the fact that many enterprise teams have to toggle between standalone tools, Zoho aims to deliver something closer to a true operating system.

A Connected Workspace Designed for Frontline Service Teams

The most immediate impact comes from the redesigned interface. Zoho One’s new “Spaces” structure organizes tools by context, whether for personal productivity, company-wide collaboration, or functional areas like marketing, sales, or finance. The value proposition here is to reduce friction.

The Action Panel and unified Approvals take that concept further, pulling tasks, sign-offs, and action items from across the stack into a single view. Customer-facing roles, especially those that handle service escalations and sales cycles, often have to pull data from multiple apps. This approach aims to reverse that dynamic by pushing relevant information to the user instead of the other way around.

Dashboards and the new Boards framework also help consolidate operational and customer-related data. Because Boards can be assembled from Zoho’s own analytics or third-party dashboards brought in through single sign-on, customer support and sales teams can combine metrics, from ticket backlog to deal progression to customer sentiment, within one context.

Unified Integrations for Consistent CX Across Systems

Customer-facing operations typically rely on diverse systems covering ticketing, CRM, commerce platforms, payment portals, and engagement tools. Zoho has addressed this with a stronger emphasis on native integrations and an expanded model for third-party connectivity.

The unified integration panel gives administrators full visibility into Zoho-to-Zoho and Zoho-to-third-party connections, including recommendations for additional integrations.

Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist at Zoho, said during a media briefing that limits on integrations are typically dictated by outside vendors:

“There are limits in terms of capability and the exposure of their API… technically, as long as they support some of the standard protocols, it’s fairly straightforward.”

The introduction of a unified portal may have the most impact on customer experience operations. Instead of customers juggling multiple logins for CRM updates, support tickets, commerce orders, payments, and more, organizations can merge all their portals, including those from non-Zoho systems. For large enterprises especially, where siloed customer portals are a known pain point, this consolidation could help improve customer effort scores.

Domain verification, authentication records, and other behind-the-scenes tasks can also now be handled centrally. This includes new support for GoDaddy users, who can authorize automatic updates to DNS records, which is a useful capability for customer service and marketing teams that previously relied on IT intervention.

AI Steps Into a More Contextual Role

AI is deeply embedded in the release through Zia, Zoho’s AI assistant, which has an expanded footprint, and new intelligence hubs. Because Zoho One unifies data from more than 50 apps, Zia can take on tasks that span categories, for example, pulling HR, CRM and support information into a single query.

For example, it can help leaders understand how much time each employee spent with a particular account, Vegesna said, which requires cross-system reasoning not typically possible in isolated applications.

Zia Hubs, now promoted to a standalone application, automatically collects content such as signed contracts or recorded meetings into dedicated hubs. Users can then query that information directly. Vegesna explained:

“All the documents that you put in that hub… you can say, ‘hey, here are the same documents. Show me only the documents that auto renew within the next three months.’”

This could streamline contract renewals, customer onboarding, or issue-resolution workflows by exposing the right information without manual digging.

AI also assists in product navigation. Zia is trained on all 55+ Zoho applications, which means a user can ask how to run an Instagram campaign and be guided directly to the relevant tool, in this case, Zoho Social, and receive recommendations on how to use it, Vegesna noted.

Zia is coming into the status bar of Zoho One. Zia will be able to create and plug in widgets because the data is connected to the back end and powered by analytics. Users will be able to select from preset reports and dashboards and they are organized, whether they are CRM, HR or support related, such as a helpdesk overview, and pinned to the dashboard, Vegesna said.

“Because we have a broad suite of applications that are deeply integrated on our stack, and have the context that enables the intelligence… we are basically embedding [AI] contextually so that the user does not even know that they’re using AI here.”

Ensuring Data Sovereignty and Enterprise Control

Security and data sovereignty are becoming an increasing concern for enterprises as they pay more attention to where AI systems source and store data. Zoho made clear that its ability to operate its own full stack from infrastructure to applications enables deployment models that many competitors can’t match. As Vegesna noted:

“In sovereignty… we are doing these on-premise deployments in some countries where your data center has to be set up in that country, because we own … the entire stack … we are able to do it particularly when dealing with governments.”

The demand for national or regional control is growing, especially in markets where critical communication systems must remain within the country’s borders to comply with data privacy regulations. “They want to own some key aspects. For example, communication … I don’t want someone else to … pull the plug on my communication systems, so I want it on my data center within my country … those have come up a lot, and we are doing those deployments as well.”

Encryption and data governance were also focal points. Zoho confirmed that customers can now bring their own encryption keys and assign them at the application level. “On the security side … customers ask, ‘Can I bring in my own encryption keys and encrypt my data within Zoho?’ And now we are enabling that,” Vegesna said. “They can now select which applications can use what encryption key, and they can define encryption keys based on their specific set of applications, like their documents [and] emails.”

Zoho argues that AI governance, especially around permission systems, has been overlooked in broader industry discussions. Vegesna said:

“B2B LLMs are different from B2C LLMs, because the permission layer plays a very critical role. I think nobody can do a solid AI strategy and implementation if you do not have a directory system in there. And we have been saying it for years, and we are one of the very few vendors who do directly in Zoho, because that has the entire permissions structure in place.”

Cloud directory integrations that enable permissions are a granular level should be at the core of enterprise AI.

“If we do not have a directory system, we cannot say we can do good AI that is well protected, and you should not have access to some data that AI just memorized, because that all has to be under a firewall and the permission system.”

“We own the triple A: authentication, authorization and access control,” Vegesna added.

Together, these capabilities reinforce Zoho’s pitch to enterprises, that unified architecture and control over its infrastructure allow for tighter data governance and deployment models that meet stringent regulatory or geopolitical requirements.

The through-line across the release is the shift away from app-centric work toward context-centric work. This is a change that resonates strongly in customer-facing environments where speed, accuracy, and personalization depend on smooth access to data.

By pulling together dashboards, workflows, approvals, and AI-generated insights from across the business, Zoho One offers a way to reduce employee and customer effort. Functions that are traditionally fragmented, including billing, support, onboarding, and renewals, can be unified at the workflow and data level rather than treated as separate systems stitched together by manual processes.

For enterprises looking to consolidate their customer-facing tech stack without compromising on data control or the breadth of tools, Zoho is positioning the new release as a platform that can serve both operational needs and experience-driven outcomes.

They’re running on static journeys, and disconnected data. Context that should guide the next move gets trapped in silos. Customers end up repeating information to different agents, something more than 70% say businesses need to fix.

Delays are expensive. They make support lines longer, drive costs up, and quietly chip away at loyalty. It’s why real-time customer journey orchestration (RTJO) is moving to the heart of customer experience work. The idea isn’t complicated: watch what’s happening right now, match it with what you already know about the person, and act before the moment slips.

What Real-Time Customer Journey Orchestration Means

“Real-time” gets thrown around often, but in customer service it has a very specific meaning. It isn’t about answering a phone a little faster. It’s about noticing a customer signal the instant it happens, matching it to a live, unified profile, and deciding what to do before the customer has to ask.

Think of a failed card payment. A traditional system might flag it overnight, adding the customer to a recovery email list. Real-time journey orchestration (RTJO) does something very different: it sees the decline, checks recent interactions, weighs account value and risk, and can trigger an SMS with a retry link or route the next contact to an agent who already knows the issue. The action happens while the customer is still engaged.

That ability rests on three pillars:

• Unified identity and context: A customer data platform or connected CRM keeps every click, call and payment tied to one profile, even if the person has shifted from anonymous browsing to an authenticated account.
• Intelligent decisioning: Rules and AI models balance relevance with compliance and cost – choosing whether to push self-service, escalate to a skilled agent, or pause other messaging.
• Omnichannel activation. Whether it’s an email, app push, proactive chat, or direct hand-off to the contact centre, the response must travel through the right channel instantly – with full context for the human who picks it up.

For service teams, the change is dramatic. They’re no longer scrambling after a problem has exploded. They can spot it as it happens, adjust, and solve it while the chance to keep a customer happy, and avoid another expensive follow-up, is still alive.

Benefits of Real-Time Customer Journey Orchestration

When service teams can read what’s happening in real time and act on it, the rewards show up fast. Real-time customer journey orchestration cuts service costs, protects revenue, and keeps customers from abandoning a brand when frustration peaks.

The clearest way to see the impact is by looking at the “moments” where speed and context matter most. Each represents a chance to either save a relationship or lose it.

Rescue moments: failed payments, abandonments, and stuck self-service

Few situations create friction faster than a transaction failure or a dead-end in self-service. Traditional systems may capture the error but act too late, often following up hours later with an email that the customer ignores. Real-time journey orchestration (RTJO) turns those critical failures into a save opportunity.

When a payment declines, the platform can instantly attempt an alternate payment rail, trigger a push or SMS with a retry link, or, if the customer calls, route them to an agent who already sees the failure and possible fixes. In self-service channels, if a chatbot loop or authentication issue stalls progress, orchestration tools can escalate to a human before the customer abandons the journey.

For instance, HSBC implemented a real-time system, and cut abandonment rates by 48%, reduced average handle time by five minutes per interaction, and lowered transfers by 32%. Supervisors also gained about two extra hours each day thanks to live insights and routing improvements.

Disruption moments: travel changes, outages, and service incidents

Unplanned events like a flight delay, a broadband outage, or a medical service surge can overwhelm service channels if handled slowly. Batch notifications or static IVR menus simply can’t keep up when thousands of customers need help at once.

Real-time journey orchestration lets organizations push clear, timely updates and adapt routing rules as conditions change. Instead of customers flooding phone lines blind, they can get personalized alerts, self-service options, or direct access to specialized support. Some companies even use insights to stop issues before they happen.

IC24, a leading U.K. healthcare provider, once reviewed barely 2 percent of patient interactions by hand. Today, it analyzes every single one through a real-time analytics platform. That shift has meant faster, safer decisions during sudden demand spikes (including the intense waves of COVID) and slimmer IVR paths that get patients to the right care without delay.

Value moments: catching opportunity while it’s live

Some moments aren’t about fixing what’s broken – they’re about recognizing a chance to add value before it slips away. A customer lingering on a premium product page, an account edging toward a usage cap, a family planning a major purchase. These signals fade fast if a brand waits until the next scheduled campaign.

With real-time journey orchestration (RTJO), service and sales teams can react while interest is still warm. Decision engines weigh browsing behavior, account history, and risk markers, then trigger an action that feels helpful rather than pushy.

For example, at Ambuja Neotia, an Indian real-estate group, instant lead scoring and agent-assist tools mean the most engaged prospects go straight to the right rep. Hot-lead conversions jumped from 40% to 80%, doubling the impact of each marketing dollar.

Effort moments: smooth handoffs when automation stalls

Self-service has its limits. Voice systems mishear names, bots loop endlessly, and authentication can fail at the worst possible moment. What drives customers away isn’t automation itself – it’s having to start over once they finally reach a human.

Real-time journey orchestration keeps that from happening. The system watches for friction, then hands the case to a live agent with everything intact: menu selections, transcripts, account context. The customer moves forward instead of back to square one. Employees get guidance, too.

For instance, brokerage Angel One tied all service channels into one platform and gave agents guided workflows in real time. The payoff: first-call resolution climbed by 18–20% and average handle time dropped 30%, even as remote work reshaped its contact centers.

Experience moments: listening live and improving fast

Great service isn’t just about reacting to obvious events. It’s also about spotting friction before it turns into a complaint. Every digital tap, survey response, or call recording is a clue if it can be processed fast enough to drive change.

Real-time journey orchestration (RTJO) gives service leaders that ability. Feedback and behavioral signals flow in as they happen; analytics engines flag patterns; orchestration tools adjust messaging, routing, or self-service flows the same day instead of weeks later.

Example: Spanish bank ABANCA uses live feedback across contact centers and digital channels to spot pain points and act quickly. The approach has fueled higher acquisition conversion and sped up process improvements.

By treating every click and comment as a potential signal and closing the loop immediately, brands move from reactive fixes to continuous improvement. Agents benefit just as much. Broken workflows get fixed quickly instead of forcing customers to call again and again.

Implementing Real-Time Customer Journey Orchestration

Acting in the moment doesn’t happen by chance. It takes planning – linking identity, live events, decisioning, and every service channel into one fast, connected loop. For customer service teams, getting this right means fewer escalations, lower handle times, and a journey that actually feels connected.

The most important thing? The right architecture. Teams need building blocks for:

• Identity and consent. A customer data platform (CDP) or connected CRM becomes the single source of truth. It keeps track of who the customer is — even as they move from anonymous browsing to an authenticated session — while respecting consent rules.
• Event fabric. Systems need a live feed of signals: failed payments, app errors, delivery updates, usage spikes. Standardizing those feeds keeps triggers reliable.
• Rules and AI models decide what should happen next. They balance urgency, relevance, and compliance – for example, suppressing a marketing email while routing a payment failure to an agent.
• Once a decision is made, the action must happen instantly: an SMS, app push, proactive chat, or a fully contextual hand-off to the contact center. Modern CCaaS platforms increasingly build this natively for instance, check out Genesys Cloud’s journey management capabilities and NICE’s orchestration innovations
• The leaders in orchestration keep a close eye on first-contact resolution, transfer rates, abandonment, containment in self-service, and how much effort customers actually spend. They add voice-of-customer sentiment to see whether journeys feel easier.

Building this doesn’t require a massive, years-long overhaul. Many teams start small: tie together identity and event data, launch a few high-impact triggers, and grow once the results prove the value

The Future for Real-Time Customer Journey Orchestration

Real-time orchestration today is mostly about reacting well when something happens. The next wave will go further: predicting and preventing friction before the customer ever feels it.

One driver is agentic AI – systems that don’t just suggest next steps but quietly reshape journeys in the background. These tools will summarize interaction history, recommend compliant responses, and update rules when patterns shift. Instead of waiting for analysts to re-map journeys, the platform itself will fine-tune flows as new behaviors emerge.

Another change is predictive service. By combining journey analytics with machine learning, platforms can spot early signs of trouble – like unusual app activity or network data that hints at a looming outage – and trigger preemptive outreach. Customers might get a helpful notification or an alternative payment option before they even know there’s a risk.

Governance will matter more, too. As orchestration engines start to make proactive decisions in regulated industries such as banking, healthcare, and utilities, companies will need transparent audit trails and clear consent management. Decisioning can’t be a black box when compliance and trust are at stake.

For customer service leaders, this shift means fewer angry calls and lower costs, but it also means new skills: journey scientists who tune models, CX strategists who weigh risk and reward, and operations teams ready to roll out changes fast. The brands that build this muscle now will be ready when orchestration moves from reacting in seconds to preventing problems altogether.

Building an Engine for the Moments That Matter

People make up their minds about a brand in fast, fragile moments – when a payment fails, a call drops, or a service hiccup ruins the day. Real-time customer journey orchestration flips those points of friction into chances to help, keep revenue on the table, and avoid another round of costly support.

The approach is straightforward: stay tuned to live events, understand who they affect, and step in right then, while the moment still matters.

Ready to upgrade journey orchestration? Explore our guide to the power of generative AI in CJO, or discover how to scale safely, with this article on secure, scalable orchestration.