Today, customers want to achieve their service and purchasing goals through simple and connected experiences across any channel they choose. They expect you to know them, know where they’ve been and what they’re trying to achieve. And they want their experience to be easy. This is where customer journey orchestration comes in.

Why customer journey orchestration — and why now? Customer journey orchestration is an approach to guiding customers through their unique journeys with a brand, ensuring that each interaction is relevant, timely and tailored to their needs. And it requires an understanding of the customer journey using technology.

In this blog, we’ll explore how businesses can evolve from traditional approaches to personalization to journey orchestration, which enables them to transform customer experience (CX) and move from being business-centric to people-centric. This is only possible with the power of an AI-powered experience orchestration platform.

Why Customer Journeys Matter

In recent years, managing journeys has significantly evolved, thanks to advancements in digital transformation, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). In the past, businesses primarily focused on the sales funnel journey, guiding customers from awareness to purchase. However, customer journeys go beyond the sales funnel, encompassing the entire customer lifecycle with a company.

Today, experience orchestration platforms analyze vast amounts of customer data and provide insights you can act on in real time. For example, you can adapt marketing campaigns, messaging and content to individual customer information, behavior and preferences.

Using journey orchestration, you can continually adjust and fine-tune the journey your customers take, optimizing each interaction so that it’s as effective and seamless as possible.

Understanding in real time what customers are trying to do and the impact on your business creates an opportunity for a continuous cycle of success. But it also requires real-time coordination to make sure that journey is effortless.

Addressing the Internal Hurdles

The challenge in orchestrating these journeys across multiple channels is that most companies are organized in traditional functional departments like sales, marketing teams, product and customer service.

While this structure makes it easy for teams to communicate and execute processes within their function, it creates issues when trying to understand customer engagements that are enabled by multiple functions.

The result is that you force your customers to navigate a maze at every touchpoint. And it requires them to continually tell you who they are and what they’re trying to do. That leads to some serious frustration, and it introduces a major risk to customer loyalty. What’s needed is a blueprint to help customers navigate that journey.

Transforming Disparate Data Into Customer Journey Data

An event data platform collects, organizes and augments your interaction data. It fine-tunes it and turns it into journey data that you can surface, analyze and act on based on the journey maps you created. With journey management capabilities, you can see how these journeys are performing and use the insights to take action.

For example, a customer might call back a day after going through a digital interaction with your business. Ideally, that customer should avoid the bot and go right to an agent or have a simpler self-service process. To orchestrate that process requires knowledge of the customer’s behavior and looking at patterns throughout the journey. This rich view into behavior and intent helps you diagnose the health and relevancy of those journeys.

Gain a Holistic Customer View with Customer Journey Management

Your customers are on their own journeys with unique goals — no matter what you’ve planned or designed for them.

Having a holistic view of them allows you to properly orchestrate those journeys. And journey orchestration is most successful when it’s embedded within a comprehensive customer journey management approach. Let’s see how it works.

Journey management focuses on the paths your customers take as they seek to achieve a goal, rather than optimizing single interactions at each touchpoint. It reveals what’s happening at different points along the customer journey or what’s underperforming and why.

Once you can visualize these paths of customer behavior, it’s possible to measure, monitor and analyze them. The insights also enable you to take corrective actions. You can also personalize the journey for the next best action to take or feed the insights back into an experience orchestration engine to do all those things.

Effective journey management aligns internal teams around customer experience and provides the foundation for an outside-in view of customer experiences.

Customer journey orchestration allows you to improve journey outcomes by enabling the most relevant interactions in the context of each customer’s goals and their overall experiences. You can engage prospects and customers at optimal points along their journeys, in real time and through the most effective channels.

Orchestration uses each customer’s entire experience so you can determine how the customer journey can be improved and then drive desirable outcomes, thereby delivering a deeper level of personalization.

Mapping and Analyzing the Customer Journey

Mapping customer journeys is an important component’s a way to visualize and communicate your customers’ experiences across touchpoints and over time as they seek to achieve a specific goal. Mapping gives you insights into customer behavior so you can optimize each stage of the journey.

First, decide which journeys you want to manage and track. By aligning your entire business around your clients, their goals and the journeys they take to achieve them, you can better understand customer behavior and make more informed decisions about how to optimize CX.

Then, create maps for a subset of journeys, focusing on those that drive high transaction costs or high incremental customer value. This is a great starting point for designing personalized customer experiences. And these maps can serve as the foundation for programs that optimize the entire customer journey.

Once you can visualize customer behavior, it’s time to assess how it affects the metrics that matter most. Journey analytics enables you to answer questions rapidly and make data-driven decisions.

CX leaders measure the following to understand performance and predict success for each journey:

  • Journey milestones
  • In-journey signals
  • Journey success metrics

There are a wide variety of in-journey metrics — conversion, NPS, CSAT, inaction, elapsed time and more — you should evaluate to see which captures the key moments that predict success for each journey. Journey success is captured through journey scores, which are based on end-of-journey metrics, such as satisfaction, completion rates, cost or effort scores.

The entire organization should be able to drill down and identify what isn’t working when metrics fluctuate. It should be easy to calculate a problem’s impact on related outcomes like customer effort, first-contact resolution, cost to serve and more. Armed with this information, you’re ready to orchestrate actions to optimize experiences and outcomes.

Advancing from Journey Management to Experience Orchestration

Journey management gives you the blueprint for how to get customers from point A to B. It shows you where the roadblocks are and gives you an understanding of how to get around them. But it’s experience orchestration that guides the coordination of data, insights and technology to get a visitor where they want to go — and do so faster.

AI-powered experience orchestration automates processes and optimizes the end-to-end customer experience. Leveraging the power of data, analytics, automation and people enables you to deliver the right information, at the right time, to the right customer, across all touchpoints. This level of personalization provides an experience that makes each customer feel understood and valued.

By analyzing the customer journey and using the insights you surface, you can orchestrate seamless experiences that meet or exceed expectations, ultimately driving customer satisfaction, loyalty and long-term customer relationships.

Get Better Outcomes with Journey Orchestration

Customer journey orchestration is a powerful differentiator for businesses. It shapes the way you interact with customers and the quality of the experiences you can provide.

It’s a critical part of a journey management program, and the result of careful planning, strategic thinking and continuous optimization. It also requires the right tools and experience orchestration platform to support your unique business needs and target audiences.

By providing better connected and more meaningful experiences that make it easier for customers to achieve their goals, you can drive trust and loyalty while achieving business objectives.

Read more about how experience orchestration can transform your customer journeys.