Consumer-Centric Digital Transformation: The Role of Service Orchestration and AI

Abstract

Consumer behavior and expectations have changed dramatically in recent years, making customer retention and loyalty a matter of company's survival. Recent digital technology advancements allow companies to gather and cross-reference intended and actual consumer behavior data from various different sources. Large, complex data sets can then be converted into service and product recommendations with predictive intelligence to ensure personalized experiences for consumers. These factors combined enable efficient process orchestration which assures service systems synergy and offers smooth service journey for the consumer. However, current information systems can orchestrate processes mainly from an operations perspective, optimizing products and services' economics only. Therefore, we argue that market success requires developing enterprise architecture templates with service orchestration and experience intelligence capabilities at their core to transform information systems from operations-oriented into consumer-centric to allow seamless customer experience along the consumer journey and enabling smart personalization at scale. Specifically, we provide design principles for building experience-driven enterprise architectures and their information systems. By outlining current capabilities and limitations of enterprise information systems available on the market today, we suggest how to move from currently available information systems for process orchestration to consumer-centric service engines with process and experience orchestration features for experience-driven enterprise architectures envisioned by us.

While service design evolves from a focus on separate service encounters to a focus on the consumer's holistic service experience, enterprise information systems are not able to support businesses in centralizing and operationalizing accumulated consumer experience knowledge for service journey orchestration, smart personalization at scale and service experience governance yet. Here, we introduce the use of service experience orchestration and enterprise architecture information systems driven by process and experience intelligence for experience management of digitally transformed enterprises and aim to fill this gap. By aligning the IT landscape capabilities and limitations with recent developments in experience-centered service design, we introduce design principles for experience-driven enterprise architecture design in general and provide recommendations for their information systems in particular.