Using Pointillist, the journey owner is able to 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 may push them as an alternative to attain your organisation’s elusive personalisation goal.
Some of the approaches often confused with customer journey orchestration include:
Marketing Campaign Automation
Marketing campaigns are typically based on customer behaviour 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 is not sufficient to enable journey orchestration, because customer journeys are not constrained by marketing channels.
Campaign automation enables a marketer to efficiently define, execute and analyse 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 analyses click-through rates and conversions.
In contrast, journey orchestration emanates from 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 desiring 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 interactive voice response (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, so it bypasses the chat robot and routes them directly to a high-priority agent, who can assist them along with information that will avoid the customer having to re-explain the entire series of events to the agent.
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, customer journey 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 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 a customer’s experience 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 B2C marketers use to help brands deliver more contextually relevant experiences. According to Forrester, “RTIM aligns outbound marketing campaigns with inbound, customer-initiated interactions to ensure relevance.”
A common RTIM use case is the dynamic updating of 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. However, the customer never activates their new device. Clearly there is an issue. However, the company doesn’t recognise it because they are focused on the customer’s current interaction, rather than the larger journey or her overall experience.
In contrast, organisations that use a journey-based approach can take a much more comprehensive set of behaviours into account, including inaction in a parallel Device Activation Journey. They orchestrate actions that help the customer achieve their overall goal (activating their new device) instead of annoying them by myopically pursuing the marketer’s goal on a particular web page (completing another upsell).
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, analyse and improve the efficiency of business workflows. Process mining provides analysts and managers with an easy way to analyse 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 behaviour, 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, rather than the customer. It focuses on making the process analyst’s life easier by identifying inefficiencies in the process, rather than helping improve the overall customer experience by identifying impediments that block customers from reaching their goals. The customer is not the focus in the world of process mining and it lacks concepts such as behavioural 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 personalisation 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 optimise aspects of CX, but it’s not the comprehensive approach required to deliver personalised, consistent experiences to each customer based on the context provided by their unique experience with your company.
What’s Driving the Need for Journey Orchestration?
Customer expectations for personalisation 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 under deliver.
Since sales, marketing, customer service, operations and billing all engage directly with customers, many organisations can’t integrate data across business functions and touchpoints. This often results in irrelevant and inconsistent customer experiences.
CX professionals often state that delivering consistent, exceptional experiences across channels and delivering personalisation at scale are the #4 and #5 overall CX challenges they face today.
Data and Organisational Silos are Personalisation Blockers
Customers want every service interaction to be tailored to not only their persona, but their individual preferences, history and current needs. But as Forrester notes, customer-facing employees typically “lack customer context and cannot access the right knowledge and data” to do so.
