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Order management - Bringing Order to the Customer Journey
Order management - Bringing Order to the Customer Journey

February 13, 2025

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Starting at the Beginning: A Strong Foundation for Human Experience

With apologies to Julie Andrews, the iconic line from The Sound of Music—“Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start”—is especially relevant when establishing and maintaining human experience (HX) throughout the customer journey.

Strengthening Customer Relationships

Many organizations prioritize HX efforts on post-sale support, where customer issues and solutions are most visible, and where negative experiences can significantly impact a brand. However, the customer relationship often begins long before the sale. From initial research on product features and reviews to test drives and evaluations, engagement starts early. The moment an order is placed is when they officially become a customer, making it essential to prioritize a seamless experience from the outset.

Completing the Order

Order management plays a crucial role in the customer journey, encompassing various processes throughout the product and service lifecycle. Beyond the initial order, sale, fulfillments, and shipping, businesses must also align supplier orders to customer demand, forecasts, and inventory. These factors can be influenced by market conditions, new product launches, seasonality, and competitive forces.

Efficient order management extends to returns, exchanges, warranty claims, and support requests. Balancing customer satisfaction with fraud prevention ensures that employees can resolve issues promptly and cost-effectively. At the end of the product lifecycle, streamlined processes encourage repurchases and renewals while supporting sustainable end-of-life (EOL) product management within the circular economy.

Order of Magnitude Process Improvements

Many organizations collect vast amounts of customer data through orders—often extending to their suppliers, partners, and vendors—but fail to leverage it effectively. A strategic approach to order management begins with evaluating current processes and tools to identify automation opportunities. This enhances accuracy, consistency, and scalability.

Subject matter experts (SMEs) map out as-is processes, capturing key activities, datasets, and tools in the existing order management ecosystem. Using advanced AI and machine learning, hidden inefficiencies can be uncovered, leading to actionable recommendations. Automation applies business rules and consolidates information from multiple systems into a user-friendly UI, eliminating the need to toggle between tools. This ensures timely order prioritization in line with service level agreements (SLAs) and accelerates exception handling by classifying issues and routing them to the right team.

A well-optimized order management system enhances opportunities for upselling, renewals, and repurchases. It also enables valid substitutions when inventory is low or when defective components require replacement as part of a support event. Additionally, insights generated from return processes—whether customer-initiated or required (e.g., warranty replacements or core charge returns in automotive parts)—can drive improvements.

A comprehensive order management approach delivers real-time order reporting, metrics, and KPIs, offering actionable insights into trends, feedback, logistics, and profitability. With this intelligence, business leaders can make timely, informed decisions.

Order Without the IT Chaos

One of the biggest challenges in deploying an order management solution is the complexity of packaged software and IT dependencies. A modern cloud-based implementation can eliminate this burden by seamlessly integrating with existing APIs or creating custom connectors to current tools and data sources. If needed, the system can also process data from spreadsheets and other documents.

A web-based UI allows for easy monitoring, order management, and real-time reporting—whether handled internally or through a managed service. Continuous insights and recommendations further refine processes over time.

Moving Forward in an Orderly Manner

Beyond optimizing order management, enhancing the human experience includes:

  • CSAT Sentiment Analysis – Identifying unrecognized customer dissatisfaction by classifying unstructured survey data into actionable insights.
  • Cognitive Email – Automating customer email responses with intelligent AI-driven sentiment analysis and escalation for urgent matters.
  • Ticket Insights – Extracting hidden insights from support ticket data to improve response strategies.

For a deeper understanding of how optimized order management can enhance both customer and employee experiences


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