The fast break advantage: How to master the top 4 pillars of championship customer service

March madness brackets and thrilling buzzer-beaters make the NCAA tournaments one of my favorite spring rituals. I love the Cinderella stories and cringe with no tinge of surprise when my bracket gets busted (Apparently, the odds of a perfect bracket are 1 in 120.2 billion if you know a little something about basketball).

I’m a big enough fan to love the “One Shining Moment” video montage tradition that caps each tournament with an emotional highlight reel.

All this leads me to think how customer service teams are facing their own tournament of challenges. In customer service, there's another kind of Big Dance at play. Customer service leaders today face a pressing challenge: an explosion of AI and automation tools has created more silos and complexity instead of delivering streamlined operations.

Dataversity’s 2024 Trends in Data Management survey highlights the growing challenge of disparate data, with 68% of respondents citing data silos as their top concern—up 7% from the previous year. Without unified policies, rules, and methods that apply across and beyond the enterprise, poor data quality will remain a growing concern, with 56% of data leaders struggling to balance over 1,000 data sources.

NICE CXone Mpower Orchestrator fills the operational gaps—serving as an intelligent command center to unify, optimize and automate all customer service workflows across an enterprise.

Any customer service scenario that starts on a website, or with a chatbot nearly always involves a workflow that spans outside of the customer engagement. For example, a purchase would need to be logged across the customer-service continuum by the contact center agent, the self-service channel, and billing, shipping, logistics, warehousing and inventory systems. After all, you can’t claim exceptional CX if you are hitting nothing but net in the customer journey and airballs with incorrect billing or shipping errors.

Think of it like basketball team executing a fast break to quickly score points before the defense can set up. The difference between an upset and a championship comes from orchestrating what seems, well, un-orchestratable.

Similarly, CXone Mpower Orchestrator enables a customer service team, along with every other team across the enterprise that supports customer engagements, to create a competitive advantage by responding with the speed, coordination and precision today’s customers expect.

Orchestrating the unpredictable

In basketball, the most spectacular fast breaks often appear spontaneous and unpredictable—players making split-second decisions, finding passing lanes that seem impossible and converting chances in an instant.

Similarly, managing the workflows that make up exceptional customer service requires orchestrating elements that if left uncoordinated or not optimized, can cause chaos:

1. Controlled chaos: While customer inquiries, complaints and crisis situations may appear unpredictable, AI-powered orchestration can optimize and automate processes and tasks that ultimately transform disorder into fast and expedient process execution through:
   • Removing silos between departments, applications and data
   • Proactively identifying opportunities using predictive, generative and agentic AI to identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks and other time, cost and CX impacting variables, and recommends specific resolution measures aligned with business KPIs.
   • Not just reporting and recommending solutions to issues in a dashboard but implementing the corrections for customer-service leaders
   • Eliminating the extra operational and capital expense that comes when workflows are cumbersome and resource intensive.
2. Improvisational excellence: Just as basketball players must improvise within the framework of the fast break, Orchestrator delivers the agility to adapt to unexpected anomalies like a confusing new order form that is slowing purchasing or cumbersome renewal processes, and even diagnosing why average handle time (AHT) is up and what can be done to bring it down; all while ]maintaining core service principles through:
   • AI systems that proactively suggest solutions based on similar past scenarios
   • Human-AI collaboration that combines computational power with conversational interfaces
   • Flexible workflow orchestration that adapts to the unique ebbs and flows of the business, keeping every customer impacting workflow running at maximum efficiency
   • Continuous learning systems that evolve based on each interaction
3. Invisible choreography: The best fast breaks look effortless because the underlying systems and preparation remain invisible. Like the complexity of frontline customer engagements, your customer service workflows are in place to deliver seamless experiences that hide the complex coordination happening behind the scenes through:
   • Unified capability that eliminates visible handoffs between departments
   • Integrated knowledge systems that ensure consistent information across teams
   • Background processing that completes complex tasks without customer awareness while reducing human effort on the organizational side
   • Seamless transitions between automated and human assistance
4. Anticipatory flow: Championship teams anticipate. AI-powered workflow orchestration means that you should be able to predict customer needs before they fully materialize through:
   • Real-time visibility into key metrics, including interaction volumes, customer effort scores, automation success rates, or any customized metric.
   • AI models that are purpose-built for CX to detect patterns and proactively identify optimization opportunities.
   • Previews of the impact of changes with advanced simulation capabilities before implementation.
   • Automated system adjustments based on emerging trends and patterns occurring internally and/or externally.

By mastering the art of workflow orchestration, Orchestrator delivers a true automation catalyst that transforms your customer-service workflows across the entire enterprise reactive to proactive, efficient and optimized—turning potentially negative customer experiences into opportunities to demonstrate your organization's exceptional execution capabilities.

The Final Four: Pillars of championship customer service

1. The perfect pass: Unifying customer service workflows:

Picture the point guard who sees the entire court. That’s where the AI-powered CXone Mpower Orchestrator command center comes in. The advanced technology connects front and back offices—ensuring seamless transitions between chatbots, agents and back-office processes.

When one player hands off to another in a perfect fast break, the ball never stops moving—similarly, the momentum of your customer's journey (along with the work item generated from a customer engagement) should flow without interruption, regardless of which channel, department or team member is managing a specific task.

In controlled chaos: With every work item that is created from a customer engagement whether it’s a purchase, an appointment, a renewal or an inquiry, unified workflows ensure they are immediately routed to the right resource—whether AI or human—to streamline the process, automating execution along the way.

With invisible choreography: Customers experience the same level of efficiency that they’ve come to expect from digitally engaging with your organization, where every engagement that results in a work item moves seamlessly and efficiently across the organization to a rapid resolution, all while the customer is completely unaware of the complex handoffs happening behind the scenes.

Creating invisible choreography: The complex data integration happening behind the scenes remains out of sight for customers, who revel in the experience of informed and consistent service across all touchpoints, not just those that happen in the front office.

2. Reading the defense: Proactively identifying opportunities

Akin to a forward who anticipates the defensive collapse, powerful end-to-end orchestration delivers predictive, generative and functional AI to identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks and more and then uses agentic AI, along with the approval of its human teammate, to execute the changes in the playbook that yield results. These variables nearly always have an impact on time, cost and the holistic customer experience. Orchestrator removes the obstacles, recommending and implementing process improvements aligned with business KPIs for resolution.

With anticipatory flow: AI-powered orchestration predicts roadblocks or other issues before they come to fruition—like a point guard who passes to where a teammate will be instead of where they are standing at the moment.

Through improvisational excellence: When unexpected scenarios arise, Orchestrator adapts within the framework of your service principles to create innovative solutions while maintaining process flow efficiency.

3. Court vision: Eliminating silos

Much like a championship team where every player innately knows where teammates are on the court, Orchestrator integrates data, AI models and knowledge, both from within CXone Mpower or any third-party application, creating a centralized source of truth for all workflows spanning the enterprise with the shared domain of customer service. This is where the solution truly stands out, as it’s not just another “AI-arrow” in a quiver full of other AI arrows; it’s connecting all of the data, the tasks, the processes and the applications together resulting in a customer-service center of excellence.

Enabling controlled chaos: With all information accessible in one place, your team can quickly find what’s needed during unexpected customer situations. This strategy turns potential disorder into structured responses.

4. Perfect team dynamic: Bridging human-AI collaboration

Like channeling the chemistry between players who instinctively know each other's strengths, Orchestrator aligns human agents and AI assistants to maximize performance and satisfaction. AI handles the repetitive plays, while human agents execute the creative moves unique to them.

Through improvisational excellence: Human agents, supported by AI, improvise solutions to unique customer problems while staying within the framework of service principles.

With anticipatory flow: AI predicts which information agents need next and surfaces it proactively, just as a teammate might move to the right spot on the court to move the ball.

Achieve more than just ‘One Shining Moment’ with CXone Mpower Orchestrator

As the NCAA men’s and women’s tourneys get under way, we’ve launched CXone Mpower Orchestrator to give your enterprise “One Shining Moment” after another.

Orchestrator stands out because it’s built on the industry’s most comprehensive customer service platform, offering a unified source of data and intelligence to power its insights and recommendations. By leveraging CXone Mpower’s advanced omnichannel journey orchestration, workforce management, self-service automation, and purpose-built AI, Orchestrator delivers a complete view of end-to-end customer service workflows like no other solution.

Tailored intelligence with AI purpose-built for CX

Orchestrator uses CX domain-specific AI models, trained with industry and brand-specific data. This ensures every insight is relevant, accurate and aligned with an organization’s unique brand identity and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Actionable intelligence

Orchestrator goes beyond basic business intelligence and reporting. Its insights aren’t limited to just interaction data or isolated workflows. Instead, AI-fueled orchestration provides a holistic view, integrating robust workforce details that deliver comprehensive analytics to both customer journeys and the business processes and tools that support them. Unlike other business intelligence (BI) and reporting tools, Orchestrator identifies why an issue is occurring, define the changes needed to fix it and then implement those changes. Historically, changes to workflow process could take weeks if not months, but here they are implemented in minutes.

Much like a championship team’s strategy in crunch time, technology that optimizes service workflows can pinpoint exactly when automation will deliver the winning play. Intelligently matching knowledge assets enables an enterprise to create its own version of the perfect bracket—one where your organization consistently beats the odds, every customer interaction advances toward satisfaction and every resource is deployed at the moment of maximum business impact.