online shopping with credit card and tablet

What Is Customer Journey Orchestration?

A customer journey is the sum of every interaction that a customer has with your brand. It starts from the first moment they see your ad, to their satisfaction survey response. However, individual journey steps go nowhere without an well-laid path.

 

WHAT IS JOURNEY ORCHESTRATION?

Customer journey orchestration bridges the gaps between teams and systems to actually manage the customer journey, not just let it happen. The process links what once were ad-hoc interactions into a series of compelling interactions. No matter when and where customers interact with your brand, journey orchestration helps build customer engagement and loyalty. Traditionally, customers interact with a part of the business like marketing, sales, or service. Unfortunately, their experience often has inconsistencies when moving between the siloed experiences that organizations create.

 

KEY JOURNEY ORCHESTRATION USE CASES

Customer journey orchestration is ultimately about delivering great customer experiences. Whatever form that takes at your business, it requires connecting channels, creating more individualized experiences, and empowering employees with more data, all along the entire lifecycle of the customers. Generally, businesses employ orchestration when they want to listen to customers, understand their needs and desires, decide on the next best action and act in real time. These examples are some of the most frequent use cases in the customer journey space and solving for them can put any business on a fast track for success.

While these are far from the only use cases, they represent the wide applications that this powerful technique can have for proactive businesses.

 

PERSONALIZED COMMUNICATIONS BASED ON CROSS-CHANNEL BEHAVIOR

One of the key frustrations for customers is an inconsistent experience. Often, when changing from mobile to social channels, or from web to in-app experiences, customers face inconsistencies that thwart great experiences. To a business, each of these may be the domain of a different team, but for customers, they’re all part of the same organization. One application is to listen across all channels to sync messaging and experiences. This might mean changing an email cadence to react to digital behavior or it may be altering the website to direct concerned customers to service while they’re having a problem.

 

CLOSING CUSTOMER SERVICE GAPS

Few things are more frustrating than having to make a second call to customer service- especially if it’s impossible to speak with the person who originally helped you. The reasons for this are varied, but first call resolution has become a major push for customer service organizations as a result. What customer journey orchestration cannot only make first call resolution more likely, but also make future calls less frustrating if a single call cannot resolve a complaint. By connecting data about the customer’s experience, a well-orchestrated journey management tool can flag a customer who is likely to reach out—and for what reason. When connected with CRM data and powerful decisioning capabilities, customers can be routed to agents that they’ve had positive previous experiences with or simply provide agents with all of the relevant information at a glance.

 

CROSS-CHANNEL LEAD PRIORITIZATION AND NEXT BEST EXPERIENCE

Often, modern businesses have multiple business units attracting the same customers. For example in the banking space, customers for mortgages might also be in the market for credit cards, auto loans and other financial services products. Managing communications across business units is a key function. Where traditional campaigns would slot a customer into each relevant communication stream, customer journey orchestration allows organizations to create the right message for each individual. By shifting the focus from selling a particular product, to delivering the right message for the individual, businesses are able to achieve their goal of increased sales while also creating better customer experiences.

 

WHAT CUSTOMER JOURNEY ORCHESTRATION IS NOT

While customer journey orchestration connects many pieces of technology and practice, it can often be confused with related terms and tools. This section is to identify some of those most common sources of confusion and provide clarity.

 

CUSTOMER JOURNEY ORCHESTRATION VS. CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT

Campaign management helps companies execute a single campaign, possibly connecting information from one campaign to another, but isn’t designed to be a holistic view of individual customers. It is a paradigm shift to move from campaigns to journeys. This means orchestrating many campaign elements in real time. It’s more than just several interconnected campaigns, but can look like many campaigns, and potentially hundreds of triggers/behaviors being calculated at once. Where campaign management puts customers into a campaign, customer journey orchestration gets your systems working in harmony to deliver an experience for the customer at their own pace, across any number of campaigns, programs, or experiences.

 

CUSTOMER JOURNEY ORCHESTRATION VS. CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPPING

A map is often the first step to creating a journey, but journey orchestration goes much further than that. While customer experience leaders have been making maps for years, journey mapping is often a goal in its own right. The difference is that while mapping helps marketers and CX leaders understand the journey, orchestration is about influencing the journey as it occurs. Where mapping shows connections between systems, orchestration makes those connections and delivers experiences across them.

 

CUSTOMER JOURNEY ORCHESTRATION VS. A DATA CONNECTION PROJECT

While you always need good data in order to get good results from customer journey orchestration, most businesses actually already have the data they need, they just need it to be connected together. Where a data project can take years and result in no organizational changes, implementing journey orchestration can have extremely rapid results. Not only that, data connections are nothing without a real-time personalization engine to intelligently direct data where it needs to go and better still, to do something with that data. Data is only as good as what you can do with it.

 

CUSTOMER JOURNEY ORCHESTRATION VS. CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

The key difference between these two is that customer experience is a wide field, often including things that journey orchestration isn’t or doesn’t do, or that a perfectly good journey orchestration strategy wouldn’t involve. Customer experience is about having a holistic view of the entire customer.

Customer journey orchestration is about enhancing that experience in real time. Not just understanding or working with the customer experience, but rather making connections and automating experiences. The strategy, technology and operational success within customer experience comes from orchestrating those experiences into a consistent introduction to your brand. Journey orchestration is a powerful tool in the arsenal of anyone interested in delivering a great customer experience.

 

WHAT IS CUSTOMER JOURNEY ORCHESTRATION TO YOU?

The traditional campaign management viewpoint has shifted. More than just a series of interactions, it’s an intervention in the entire customer lifecycle, connecting touchpoints to enable an incredible customer experience.

For modern enterprise businesses, making incremental change across hundreds of thousands or millions of customers can have an enormous impact on the bottom line. Customer journey orchestration delivers proven results that can make those changes. As markets demand businesses to do more than just deliver incremental returns and instead deliver revolutionary customer experiences, orchestration supports responsive, adaptive and individualized experiences to each customer.

get the guidebook

CSG logo in black.

CSG

CSG Insights Team