Editorial
The Gist
- Customer journey enhanced. Customer journey orchestration streamlines real-time experiences, fostering continuous engagement.
- Engagement levels soar. Customer engagement rises with journey orchestration, improving interaction quality at every sales funnel stage.
- Satisfaction achieved. Customer satisfaction is elevated through journey orchestration, ensuring a unique and personalized experience.
The customer is at the center of the modern, data-driven retail experience. No matter what a brand is selling, it always benefits from putting the customer center stage. One way companies are doing this is through customer journey orchestration. Let’s consider the term and look at the ways journey orchestration can elevate the customer experience.
What Is Customer Journey Orchestration?
Journey orchestration focuses on orchestrating the customer journey.
The current goal of journey orchestration as an emerging field, according to Adobe Experience Cloud, is “the coordination of customer experiences in real-time to encourage customers to continue to engage with a company.” In other words, it is an ongoing activity that considers each individual customer journey and seeks to keep them engaged with your brand.
This is different from customer journey management in the sense that it doesn’t just consider customer data to improve a static journey established for their particular audience demographic or segment. Customer journey orchestration goes further by turning each individual customer into their own unique journey.
A well-executed customer journey is orchestrated so as to put the customer at the center of everything that they do as they work their way from initial contact and brand awareness down the sales funnel and beyond the point of purchase.
Related Article: Unveiling the Power of Customer Journey Orchestration
What Are the Benefits of Journey Orchestration?
Here are a few of ways journey orchestration can refine and improve the customer journey:
Cultivating Greater Engagement
Journey orchestration can increase engagement across the entire sales funnel. Content advertising brand Nativo is an example of how content-based advertising can impact the customer orchestration process early on. Its platform enables customers to use the content in the consideration stage of the sales funnel as a way to spark engagement and buy-in.
Meaningful engagement is often lacking in customer service. Five9’s CCaaS (contact center as a service) platform can help connect customers with qualified agents and solutions, improving the quality of each interaction. By filling in these traditionally latent areas of the customer journey, teams can improve engagement and flesh out the experience at every step that a consumer takes.
Related Article: Will 2023 Be a Breakthrough Year for Customer Journey Orchestration?
Bringing Together Inter-Departmental Collaboration
Often, a journey orchestration team takes on the role of a customer experience team. It can include individuals from various departments, too, such as product development, marketing and customer service.
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When this happens, it naturally boosts the communication and awareness between departments and teams within a company. This helps everyone stay closely connected as they shepherd each customer through their journey.
Enhancing Customer Connections
Journey orchestration keeps everyone on the same page by ensuring the right team members are connected to all relevant parts of the customer journey at all times. That doesn’t necessarily mean marketers and customer service reps are both talking at once. However, they remain aware of each customer’s situation rather than passing them off to one another and creating disconnects within the system.
Wendy’s demonstrated this concept when a teenager asked how many retweets it would take to get free chicken nuggets for a year. Ready to respond at a moment’s notice, the fast food team answered, “18 million.” Acting on real-time interactions led to a clever response, free nuggets for a spunky customer for a year, and a massive uptick in engagement across the brand’s socials.
Related Article: 4 Strategies to Boost Customer Engagement
Developing a Holistic View of the Customer Journey
Journey orchestration yields key data. Companies can utilize this to further flesh out the understanding of their customers. They can also use it on an individual basis as they compile information about each potential and even existing patron.
For example, if a customer uses a certain amount of the features of a tool from a particular software as a service (SaaS) company, they might trigger an upsell message. This can take place because the sales and marketing teams are aware that the particular customer’s experience and knowledge have reached a certain point where they may be interested in premium features.
Related Article: 4 Steps Toward Successful Customer Journey Orchestration
Optimizing Your Customer Journey in 2024
Journey orchestration is a fresh new layer of consideration for the customer journey. It enables companies to go to all-new levels as they serve their future and existing customers alike.
If you’re considering how you can integrate the concept of orchestration into your customer journey, the best place to start is with a customer journey map. Use this to visualize how you think customers will engage with your brand.
Remember, this is just a static representation using past data. However, it’s a good starting point. From there, cultivate buy-in on the concept of journey orchestration within your company. Work on building an internal system focused on communication and collaboration in real-time, too.
If you can put these elements in place, you can begin to unleash the power of journey orchestration for your brand as you blaze the trail into 2024 and beyond.
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