With experience orchestration, journey owners can measure success by an increase in the completion rate of the mobile refinancing journey and a significant decrease in leakage into the contact center from this journey.
What Journey Orchestration Isn’t
While customer journey orchestration might sound familiar, it’s important to distinguish between it and other approaches that sound similar. These approaches may already exist or other vendors might push them as an alternative to attain your organization’s elusive personalization goal.
Some of the approaches often confused with customer journey orchestration include the following.
Marketing Campaign Automation
Marketing campaigns are typically based on customer profiles and behavior from one or a limited number of channels. This is often the case because marketing campaign management systems typically contain data from the limited set of customer interactions that marketing controls, primarily web and email. This subset of the customer experience isn’t sufficient to enable experience orchestration because customer journeys aren’t constrained by marketing channels.
Campaign automation enables a marketer to efficiently define, execute and analyze dozens or hundreds of campaigns. For example, a marketer might send a message to a customer’s phone that links to a landing page. The content on the page is based on which products that customer has.
After submitting the form, the system automatically sends an email with content based on the action taken. Finally, the marketer analyzes click-through rates and conversions.
In contrast, journey orchestration starts with the customer. The context is centered on their current goal, which is represented by the journeys they are on, and comprises the entirety of their experience with the company.
Take, for example, a customer who wants to move money from one account to another via their mobile phone. They encounter a problem completing the transaction and turn to the website first and then call the care center for support.
After getting lost in the IVR system, they go back to the website and try the chat feature. The chat platform queries the journey orchestration platform, where it determines that they are a high-value customer in a money transfer journey who has already interacted with the website and IVR system within the past hour.
It then bypasses the chatbot and routes them directly to a high-priority agent. This agent can assist the customer because they’re equipped with information that eliminates the need for the customer to re-explain the entire series of events.
In essence, campaign management is focused on automating the next action within a series of steps defined by marketers. While campaign management puts your customers into the context of marketer-defined campaigns, experience orchestration puts all the resources of your customer into the context of your customer’s individual experience.
Marketers cannot dictate a customer’s experience; your customers engage with your business in their own way — email, chat, on your website, through social media and even via phone — to achieve their unique goals. The experience is directed by your customer, at their own pace and through the channels they select.
Journey orchestration incorporates the full understanding and context of that customer lifetime at every interaction — whether it is instigated by your customer or your company.
Real-Time Interaction Management
Real-time interaction management (RTIM) is a capability that business-to-consumer marketers use to help brands deliver more contextually relevant experiences. RTIM combines real-time customer interactions with predictive modeling and machine learning. It aims to deliver a personalized end-to-end customer experience.
A common RTIM use case is dynamically updating offers on a website. For example, a telecommunications provider might promote new mobile phones for a customer who is due for an upgrade. Let’s say the customer purchases a new phone and the company’s offer changes to promote phone accessories.
The customer, however, never activates their new device. Clearly there’s an issue. The problem: The company doesn’t recognize there’s an issue because it’s focused on the customer’s current interaction, rather than the larger journey or the overall experience.
In contrast, organizations that use a journey-based approach can take a more comprehensive set of behaviors into account. They orchestrate actions that help the customer achieve their overall goal (activating their new device) instead of annoying them by pursuing the marketer’s goal on a particular web page (completing another up-sell).
As with campaign automation, RTIM often falls short for the customer. It’s more focused on improving the marketer’s effectiveness than improving the customer’s experience. While RTIM focuses on the importance of context, the context employed is typically limited to current and recent transactions, rather than a customer’s overall experience with the company.
Process Mining
Many chief financial officers, CIOs, digital officers and operations analysts rely on process mining to document, analyze and improve the efficiency of business workflows. Process mining provides analysts and managers with an easy way to analyze event logs within enterprise transaction systems.
Process mining measures the efficiency of a wide variety of business processes, particularly digital processes, from start to finish. Some examples include:
- Manufacturing
- Distribution
- IT service management
- Master data management
Unlike processes, customer journeys do not conform to a pre-planned sequence. Process mining captures neither individual customer behavior, nor the range and variety of customer journeys across touchpoints and time.
Therefore, process mining cannot orchestrate actions based on a customer’s comprehensive experience with your enterprise, regardless of whether you couple it with workflow automation to enable action.
Process mining focuses on the process, not the customer. It aims to make the process analyst’s life easier by identifying inefficiencies in the process instead of trying to improve the overall customer experience by identifying impediments that block customers from reaching their goals.
The customer isn’t the focus in the world of process mining. And this process lacks concepts such as behavioral segmentation or audience activation.
Nevertheless, processes within journeys should be measured and improved, such as the steps required to submit a payment through the website or for the company to process and deliver a product. But experience orchestration is about more than simply improving the efficiency of a predetermined sequence of steps. It’s about ensuring that every moment of your customer’s experience is relevant and cohesive.
In short, process mining can optimize aspects of CX, but it’s not the comprehensive approach required to deliver personalized, consistent experiences to each customer based on the context provided by their unique experience with your company.
What’s Driving the Need for Experience Orchestration?
Customer expectations for personalization have evolved immensely. Behemoths like Amazon and Netflix have transformed consumer expectations and influenced the experiences consumers demand from their banks, cable and wireless companies, and even health insurers.
Unfortunately, many enterprises underdeliver.
Since sales, marketing, customer service, operations and billing all engage directly with customers, many organizations can’t integrate data across business functions and touchpoints. This often results in irrelevant and inconsistent customer experiences.
In a recent study, less than a third of organizations say they are effective at engaging customers with the right experiences at the right times through their preferred channels. Additionally, CX professionals report that delivering consistent, exceptional experiences across channels and delivering personalization at scale rank fourth and fifth in overall CX challenges they face today.
Data and Organizational Silos are Personalization Blockers
Customers want every service interaction to be tailored to not only their persona, but their individual preferences, history and current needs. But customer-facing employees often lack customer context and cannot access the right knowledge and data to do this.
