What is Customer Journey Orchestration? A 2021 Guide

Customer journey orchestration is proving a game changer for businesses looking to create seamless interactions and boost customer experience (CX).  

As customers interact with various departments throughout their journey — from the marketing team to sales, support, and operations — siloed workflows and systems often inhibit the process. This disconnect damages the customer experience.

And that’s where customer journey orchestration comes into play.  

Let’s dive in and take a deeper look.

What is customer journey orchestration?

Customer journey orchestration is an approach to customer journey management based on each customer’s unique journey with your business rather than customer segments. It takes a holistic view of their behavior and interaction history across your organization, including marketing, sales, and service.

Ultimately, it puts customers in control of their individualized experiences, creating an evolving, continuous conversation. Every touchpoint blends in seamlessly with the next, leading to a better overall customer experience.

The benefits of customer-centric journey orchestration

Using customer journey orchestration to enhance your customer experience brings a number of benefits to both you and your customers. Here are some of the most important.

Empowered customers

Businesses can provide hyper-personalized real time customer messaging and interactions. Equipped with the most relevant information and communication, customers needs’ are met at every stage of their journey. This lays the foundation for strong, long-lasting relationships by displaying the right care and attention to customers.

Increased team efficiency

Without customer journey orchestration, different departments work disparately toward their own goals using their own information and tools. But, with 70 percent of customers saying connected internal processes are very important to their decision to buy, this approach simply won’t cut it anymore. 

Businesses that have customer journey orchestration platforms can have teams easily share information and work collaboratively to better serve customers. This level of access allows customer-facing employees to help customers more quickly and efficiently, building connections, trust, and loyalty in the process.

Insightful data

Combining customer experiences across channels and touchpoints for a complete view of the customer journey brings important insights that can help you learn and improve.  For example, you may be able to identify points of friction to be addressed, or notice any disconnects between touchpoints.

Improved performance and increased revenue

Customer journey orchestration helps businesses deliver the fast responses, convenience, and knowledgeable and friendly support interactions that almost 80 percent of American consumers consider part of a positive customer experience.

Better CX also brings increased sales, with 73 percent of customers highlighting customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions. On the flip side, bad CX can be costly — 32 percent of customers would take their business away from a brand they loved after just one bad experience.

Customer journey orchestration examples

Customer journey orchestration has customer centricity at its very heart. To get a sense of how it can improve CX, let's take a look at some examples.

Customized communication to deliver the right message

Getting the right message to the right customers, at the right time keeps them engaged with your business. This addresses a common issue customers have, with 54 percent saying that marketing messages aren’t relevant enough. 

Journey orchestration allows you to adapt communication based on customer behavior. For example, a customer with an open service ticket may be less engaged by a promotional email pushing a new offer or service. Instead, you may opt to direct them to the help they need for their issue. Or, if a customer is searching for something on your website, you can send them information on current offers.

Proactive customer service that puts customers at ease

To minimize a customer’s frustration when reaching out for support, you can use data from their journey and behavior to anticipate what issues they could have before they reach out. In fact, 67 percent of U.S. consumers prefer brands that provide proactive service notifications. You can also connect them with agents they’re familiar with and have spoken to in the past.

Collaboration across teams and business units

Enterprise businesses may have different divisions and departments reaching out to the same customer about products and services. Using customer journey orchestration to help with your campaign management initiatives, you can consolidate and send communication relevant to the customer’s specific needs and ensure you’re all singing from the same hymn sheet.

4 common challenges and solutions in customer journey orchestration

The implementation of customer journey orchestration certainly brings its challenges. And coordinating interactions and information across departments and channels can seem like a daunting task. But, with the right tools and technology in place, this process becomes easier. Some of the particular challenges you might come across are:

1. Storing and accessing customer data. Personalization is key to improving customer experience. And that depends on data far beyond simple demographic information — behavioral, purchasing, and interaction history, among other things. With a customer data platform, you can organize, store, and access this data — all in one place.  
2. Syncing messaging and experiences across channels. Developing a seamless omnichannel experience for customers requires processing massive amounts of data across numerous touchpoints, systems, and channels. A customer experience platform can help you manage and store interaction information across all these channels — whether on the phone, through email, your website, or chat.
3. Managing workflows. Part of customer journey orchestration involves managing workflows across teams to ensure interactions are routed properly and teams have access to the customer information and context they need. Platforms with centralized workflows can help you do this.  
4. Integration with end-delivery systems. Bringing data together in one place, while challenging, can only get you so far. It’s what you do with it that counts. Customer journey orchestration software connects with your email, marketing, and communication solutions to move the customer journey along smoothly.

Need help orchestrating your customer journey? The Acquire Platform could be the answer.

Customer journey orchestration improves modern customer engagement

As consumers demand ever-more personalized customer experiences, businesses face a tough challenge — because with no two customers alike, large customer segments are no longer enough.

Customer journey orchestration instead allows businesses to build journeys that can respond and adapt to customers’ unique needs, creating a mix of touchpoints specific to that person.

Delivering exceptional interactions in this customer-centric way not only equips your customers for a successful journey, it gives you an advantage over your competitors, too.

Katrina Santa Ana 

Guest Author

Katrina is a New York-based content and technical writer specializing in customer experience, marketing automation, and knowledge management topics and technologies that help businesses scale.