Workflow orchestration

In the context of B2B customer support, workflow orchestration often involves connecting tasks across teams and systems to manage complex issues. Orchestrating workflows typically involves three stages.

1. Trigger: Orchestrated workflows are set in motion by specific events, like a customer requesting a refund or a flagged duplicate charge. In a B2B context, support, customer success, and accounts teams must collaborate to define the right triggers based on factors like account health, urgency, and service-level agreement commitments.
2. Step progression: This is the execution stage, where the program acts based on a predefined sequence. Instead of running everything at once, each step executes in a logical order (or concurrently when appropriate). Consider an automated refund processing workflow. A customer’s refund request might trigger a payment processor to process the payment, a customer operations platform to close an associated support ticket, and a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to log the refund.
3. Exception handling: Even the most well-orchestrated workflow may not suit every scenario. That’s why teams create strategies to manage exceptions to the pre-defined rules. The strategies can include real-time monitoring of execution, failure, and performance metrics to catch and address issues before they snowball. If a CRM update doesn’t go through right away, an orchestrated workflow can automatically retry it a certain number of times before escalating to a human.

Why workflow orchestration matters in B2B customer operations

With so many applications, workflow orchestration has tangible benefits for B2B customer service operations teams. The practice helps teams to more easily manage escalations and complex onboarding flows.

In B2B, escalations can accelerate quickly. Support hands a technical issue to an experienced rep, who escalates it to engineering. Engineering logs the bug, solves it, then sends the answer back to support to relay to the customer. With each link in the chain, the risk of lost context or ownership compounds. Workflow orchestration controls that risk by letting teams build connected workflows that thread together different teams and tools. When every stage is linked and working in concert, context and ownership remain clear.

B2B companies also often have more complex onboarding processes, involving more than a single self-service sign-up. When things get more elaborate with various agreements and training sessions, workflow orchestration helps keep the process manageable. Say a major potential customer is ready to sign. Before committing, they need to negotiate pricing with sales, settle custom terms with legal, and coordinate with customer success on setup. An orchestrated workflow triggers onboarding actions in the right sequence and automates status updates for the relevant teams, speeding up the process and keeping contributors aligned.