What is Customer Journey Orchestration? Key concepts you need to know.

Laurent Ghio | Monday, Jul 6th 2020
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Today, customers expect every experience they have with a brand or provider to be fast, easy, and convenient. Customers want experiences that are personalized, consistent, relevant, timely, frictionless, and seamless, regardless of interaction points. 

With the ability to communicate regardless of where they are, customers don’t distinguish between online and offline interactions, or between the different areas of your business. To them, you are a single brand and they expect a consistent face and voice with relevant and personalized messages across every channel and touchpoint. To provide an exceptional customer experience, organizations must start thinking the same way.

Thus, it is vital for every organization to understand their key customer journeys. Businesses must enable collaboration across multiple departments in order to ensure their customers get the most out of their interactions through communication touchpoints along those journeys, which are the sum of every interaction that an individual customer has with your brand, from the first moment they see your ad, to their satisfaction survey response.
 

What is Customer Journey Management?

To help them get there, leading organizations use the techniques and technologies of customer journey management, which is composed of customer journey mapping, customer journey analytics, and customer journey orchestration

Customer journey mapping helps companies visually represent their key customer journeys like onboarding, renewals, and claims, and to collaborate across multiple functions to optimize the communication touchpoints along those journeys.

Customer journey analytics helps measure and understand important metrics like engagement and conversion, and enables you to identify pain points and critical moments that a customer experiences across physical and digital touchpoints.

Customer journey orchestration helps bring action to the customer touchpoints by understanding the context of the interactions and makes real-time decisions about next-best actions and personalization of messages and communications. Journey mapping provides the shared understanding and visualization of key journeys, journey analytics delivers insights, and journey orchestration provides the third pillar to turn communications into engaging conversations and continually measure and improve key processes.
 

Forrester Research defines journey orchestration tools as those that “help fuse data across channels, touch points, and systems along the customer journey to design and plan current and future-state journeys, test and optimize journey hypotheses, and orchestrate tasks among stakeholders and with customers.”
 

Why is customer journey orchestration important?

In order to remain relevant, organizations must understand how to engage with their customers across every step of the journey. 

Breaking down, or connecting, silos is critical. When organizations aren’t able to share data between and among departments and channels, the customer feels it; the experience is fragmented and takes effort. As a practice, customer journey orchestration means bridging the gaps between teams and systems to better understand your customers’ individual experiences.

In order to improve the customer experience, you must identify points of friction, or obstacles across the customer journey. To do this, organizations require centralized tools that enable them to connect channels, create more individualized experiences and empower employees with more context and understanding of what customers want and need. 

Quadient Customer Journey Explorer helps organizations build better experiences by breaking down silos, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. It includes technology from Kitewheel, a Leader in the 2020 Forrester Wave™: Journey Orchestration Platforms. 

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