As businesses strive to become truly customer-centric, many are turning to customer journey orchestration (CJO) technology to transform their fortunes. However, where do you start when buying one of these platforms, and how can it change the way the company operates?
The software integrates across a brand's consumer touchpoints — from the website and mobile app to the call center and email communications — and analyzes the customer's interactions. This helps to form a real-time picture of what the customers are trying to achieve, otherwise known as their “intent.” The CJO system then uses its “brain” (the central decision-making software) to recommend the most appropriate conversation to have with the customer to help them achieve their goal, orchestrating the most relevant response across touchpoints and, in some cases, suppressing irrelevant communications.
If they are visiting the company's website for suggestions on how to use a product, the tech can proactively share the next best conversation rather than wait for them to contact the call center. A football team deploying CJO will use knowledge about a fan's previous omnichannel behavior to provide them with relevant content when they visit the website or mobile app, making for a richer experience.
By making the customer's journey smoother, more effective and tailored to their individual needs, journey orchestration tech can boost customer engagement and help to retain their custom. This raises their lifetime value, builds their loyalty and, ultimately, drives profitable, customer-led growth. It's the breadth of value that journey orchestration technology can provide across the business that makes it attractive for organizations.
As with any new technology space, there are some off-putting acronyms and terminology to contend with. Also, many claims are made around journey orchestration by tools and technology that simply don't have the required capabilities. This makes choosing the best platform for your business harder. What is really important is to first understand the differences between CJO and some of the alternative systems on offer. Here, hopefully, is an easy initial guide.
• Customer data platforms. These are the starting point for businesses looking to connect customer data. These databases store data about customer interactions and build a single view of the customer. Marketers use this data to create personalized and targeted campaigns and audiences such as emailing contacts or reminding customers about renewal dates. They lack any true customer journey context and lack the necessary capabilities to understand customer journeys and activate that insight in real time across each and every interaction.
• Cross-channel campaign management (CCCM) tools. These help brands run digital marketing campaigns across any combination of email, web, physical mail, social media or mobile app. They offer segmentation and deliver automated responses to customers. These tools help target marketing and sales campaigns at prospects, but they are not designed to anticipate and respond to customers' in-the-moment needs. They are brand-led and workflow-driven in their approach to customer conversations.
• Real-time interaction management (RTIM) tools. Technology teams implement this software to give consumers experiences and offers at the appropriate moment in the customer journey, such as a discount to a returning customer. These tools are an essential building block of CJO. However, according to a Forrester report (paywall), they do not offer the same journey visualization, breadth of engagement or ease of use for users across an organization, as they are geared more toward technical staff.
Customer Journey Orchestration
The best solutions are built for purpose and are truly channel-agnostic, able to deliver journey insights and analytics based on true customer behavior. Some vendors started as specialists in a particular channel (say, email or search) and have expanded into other areas. This will often be inferior to a vendor that is primarily a CJO specialist. Can the system access data from an unlimited range of sources, from web interactions, mobile apps, sales and marketing systems, point of sales tech and customer service platforms?
Organizations should be looking for technology that can help them individualize experiences to customers by fusing together journey analysis across billions of customer interactions, acting in the moment at the point of interaction and orchestrating the complete omnichannel end-to-end experience a customer has over time. Journey orchestration has fast become a key technology component in the modern brand's arsenal. This often means that departments need to break down the silos between them.
A great starting point is to build cross-functional teams that look at the journey holistically and aim to be more customer-focused. Key individuals in this process are marketing leaders, chief information officers or CXOs, often working with a wider and technical evaluation team. Ten or 20 years ago, they would have bought campaign management tools or databases and spoke the language of data management and single customer views. However, so much more is achievable now, and the education of journey management technology is paramount to this.
Brands also need to challenge the mentality of the business, look at longer-term metrics that represent the customer lifecycle and determine if it requires an “outside-in” approach.
Meanwhile, effective journey orchestration solutions should offer clear visualization and analysis of journeys at an individual level and allow the business to easily identify general trends among the entire customer base. Before deploying CJO, companies need to be clear about how they will embed the technology into their activities. They should select a vendor that understands their industry and their business model, and they should confirm they have a wealth of verified case studies and partner networks to demonstrate their experience, expertise and ability to scale in this fast-growing sector.
Get all of these things right, and investing in a CJO system might be the smartest move that your company makes in its mission to put the customer at the heart of the business.
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