“Businesses must have a 360-degree view of all the customer interactions on ALL channels (face to face, phone, web, mobile, SMS, chatbot, etc.). To do so, they must draw customer journey maps to see the channel(s) used on a specific touchpoint and make sure that the transition from one channel to another (e.g., from the web to the phone) is seamless,” says Daniel Lafrenière, Customer Experience Strategist at Daniel Lafrenière in Clootrack's 102 CX Expert report.
Providing a customer journey that fulfills expectations is a top priority for forward-thinking businesses of all maturity levels, but how can you deliver a personalized customer experience at scale?
Customer journey orchestration is the solution.
Through timely and relevant activities, customer journey orchestration guarantees a seamless experience for your customers and increased revenue. Customers who have these kinds of connected experiences are more likely to make purchases, do so more frequently, and refer others as well. Getting there, though, requires careful planning, team communication, and the selection of the proper platforms and metrics to link everything together.
What is Customer Journey Orchestration?
Customer Journey Orchestration (CJO) is a customer-focused approach for smoothening the customer journey in real-time to keep the relationship between the customer and the brand intact. It closes the gap between personalization and individualization in the customer journey by enabling the customer-facing team to deliver quick solutions to customers at every touchpoint.
For instance, when a customer discovers and interacts with several different components of a brand, whether from its website or physical store, the brand can use the data collected from that particular customer interaction and decide how to connect at an individual level. It is comprehensible to perceive customer journey orchestration as the path to customer service individualization.
How does Customer Journey Orchestration Enhance Customer Experience?
Customer journey orchestration has a direct and promising influence on the customer experience that flattens the customer route to acknowledge the brand's authenticity.
Here are 3 CX enhancing advantages of customer journey orchestration -
1) Add Value to the Next Action of a Customer
Continuous delivery of customer-desired actions urges a customer to move down in the customer journey funnel. Determining a flexible array of customer journeys adds context to the very next step a customer takes towards selecting the product.
2) Provide Real-Time Solutions to Customer Issues
Customer journey orchestration stimulates companies to foster timely actions. That additionally glorifies the strong association between customers and the idea of product existence in the life of the customers. Instant solutions increase the number of happy customers, which straightforwardly increases the customer retention rate.
3) Deliver Individualized Services with Dynamic Actions
Every consumer behaves in their own way as an individual defining their own reasons for using a product. Customer journey orchestration lets an organization indulge in shifting the nature of classic customer service to individualized ones through well-built customer-faced actions. On top of that, it revitalizes the customer-oriented traits in every phase to custom-tailor the customer experience.
What Are The Key Components Of Customer Journey Orchestration?
The involvement of a few elements, such as people, processes, and tools, is unavoidable for constructing an efficient customer journey arrangement. A brand can guarantee the successful launch of the customer journey orchestration program only by harmonizing the participation of customer-driving elements appropriately.
Let's understand the role of these components in customer journey orchestration -
1) Workforce of an Organization
Customer journey orchestration requires efforts from all ends of the organizational units. Broken silos and commonly shared vision polishes the development and integration of the customer journey orchestration process.
The marketing and sales team closely monitors customer movement into the conversion funnel, which is one of the critical parts of the customer journey. But, they need a tech support team to integrate APIs and software to track customer activities. The data team supplies customer data and insights simultaneously so the other departments can proceed with their customer-related tasks.
Every department in the organization concurrently plays some part in forming an organized customer journey that leads to more customers preferring the product and trusting the customer service delivered by the company.
2) Processes Implemented for Customer-Centricity
Customer-centricity has been the key to improving customer satisfaction. The deployment of customer-centric methodologies promotes employees to take the path that uplifts the execution of customer journey orchestration at multiple customer interaction moments.
A 2017 Harvard Business Review study conducted research on the shopping behavior of around 46,000 consumers and found that 73% of customers utilized multiple channels during their shopping journey.
Promoting omnichannel customer experience assists in the formation of a better customer journey orchestration structure. Likewise, scrutinizing customer deliverables becomes effective as customer care unit dealings with consumers fetch customer emotions at several junctures of customer interaction.
Further, the apt customer-interactive procedures discourage poor customer experiences as it stops a company from pushing down irrelevant content into the customers' throats through different mediums such as email, SMS messages, social media platforms, and websites. Such brand image-saving processes pave the way for the impacts that refined customer journey orchestration aims.
3) Tools Used for Process Enhancement
Certain CX tools are customer experience management (CXM) instruments that help a brand in customer experience monitoring workouts. Content Management System (CMS) and Customer Data Platform (CDP) secure seamless communication and reliability a customer desire from a brand.
Such CX tools fulfill the objective of customer journey orchestration by enforcing personalization. These tools increase the robustness of the processes that serve the customers' best interests. Furthermore, the flexibility in features of CX tools entitles coverage of an overwhelming number of functionalities that comfort the customer journey at every customer contact point.
CX tools make the administration of multiple channels easy as it allows operation from a single source. It remarkably addresses the growing needs of customers getting perfect orchestration of customer journey in place.
How to Effectively Integrate Customer Journey Orchestration with Customer Experience?
Here are 4 Steps to effectively integrate customer journey orchestration into the customer experience system -
1) Plan
A customer often uses different devices to interconnect with a brand before finalizing a suitable solution. So specifying a customer journey goal at every stage of customer experience operations is a must. A brand can figure out all the possible customer interaction paths with the help of customer data obtained from several platforms and form a customized plan that meets customer necessities and facilitates the brand to maintain industry standards.
Besides, you can prepare to form a team that is entirely dedicated to the customer journey orchestration confirming the execution and revision of customer journey improvement plans.
2) Implement
Executing an appropriate customer journey orchestration disintegrates all the hurdles customers often face while communicating with a brand. Close to that, it holds customer expectations and the company's strategic plan together to bring expected consequences.
A brand can use customer insights and metric numbers to put together the pieces of the customer journey and identify what customers really expect as the outcome before purchasing a particular product. A brand can adequately implement customer journey orchestration by incorporating all essential company assets such as human, finance, and technical resources.
3) Automate
Technological advancements have handled a giant portion of the operations carried out in the industry. One of the primary benefits of automation through technical tools is scanning results in real-time, which further allows adjustment that caters to customer demands.
Use AI-powered tools to support customers and elevate their journey experience. A brand can employ chatbots, hyper-personalized automated emails, and AI-driven voice assistants for better customer outputs. Over and above that, if automation of customer journey orchestration is successful, the top executives must drive the decision to scale up and generate higher returns.
4) Test
Augmentation of customer-focused approaches never ends. It is of utmost importance to keep an eye on customer journey arrangements to preserve the quality of what a brand serves to its customers. Identify if or not the implemented processes and tools furnish personalization.
Look for the flaws in customer journey orchestration by thoroughly analyzing customer views about the product. And to intensify the upshot of the testing stage, a brand must pursue agility and boost customer relationships with the company. Ultimately, the CX staff needs to embrace the upgradation cycle of researching, executing, and testing.
3 Persuasive Journey Orchestration Use Cases
The Salesforce research surveyed 15000+ consumers and business buyers around the world and compiled a report in which consumers suggest that 89% of them are more likely to make another purchase after encountering a positive customer experience.
Without a doubt, the best use cases of customer journey orchestration enable a brand to provide praise-worthy customer service that positively influences the customer experience.
Here are 3 persuasive journey orchestration use cases that enhance customer service -
1) Relevant Recommendations to Cross-Sell
No company can afford to lose satisfied customers as they are a valuable asset generating profits for the company. Customer journey orchestration entitles a brand to keep consumers in a loop that attaches them to the brand. Correctly identifying the needs of consumers at a particular point of the customer journey allows the brand to cross-sell products a consumer might thoughtfully require.
2) Offer Custom Solutions to Unhappy Customers
The ups and downs in customer service are natural, as it can never be perfect. Disturbance in customer service due to issues such as late delivery, extremely high customer expectations, and lack of punctual actions pushes a customer away from the brand.
Customer journey orchestration empowers customer service officials to nourish customers with custom mending solutions such as gift cards and free delivery that make up for the things that went wrong. Eventually, preserving customer and brand relations.
3) Improving Multi-Channel Customer Support
Customers often perform brand-related activities on multiple channels at their convenience. In such cases, alignment of customer support unit even on offline and online interactive channels is inviolable. A customer journey orchestration system helps a firm to monitor customer journeys in actual time on different media to address customer issues in a discrete manner.
To Wrap Up
Customer journey orchestration is an upgraded strategy to enhance the customer journey and delivers an unbeatable customer experience. It allows a company to focus on the customer journey in real-time and provide individualized attention to the consumer.
Through this approach, brands get the privilege of building an everlasting system that prioritizes customer engagement and maintains customer loyalty.
Experimenting with unique customer acquisition and retention methodologies that trend on reasonable grounds can skyrocket the company's sales. Customer journey orchestration is an entirely customer-friendly practice a brand needs to implement.
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