Elevate engagement with customer journey orchestration

Highlights

You’ll learn about:

Benefits of customer journey orchestration:

• Enhances engagement: Deliver personalized experiences through real-time actions based on customer behavior
• Boosts revenue: CJO improves customer experience and scales business revenue by reducing costs and increasing customer lifetime value
• Increases productivity: Streamline operations and automate tasks to improve efficiency across departments

Challenges addressed:

• Overcome data silos, technology integration hurdles and personalization challenges

Essential tools:

• Use data collection, real-time analysis, marketing automation and customer journey mapping tools

For a transformative marketing approach that delivers results, start orchestrating your customer’s journey.

Keep reading to learn more!

Customers expect every brand experience to be fast, convenient, easy and omnichannel. Unless you provide personalized, consistent and relevant experiences and frictionless interaction points, your customers will become increasingly impatient with your brand.

Customers don’t think twice before switching to brands that provide a consistent, timely and personalized experience. 

Beyond tailored experiences, multi-channel sales necessitate managing your customer's path, comprehending possible shifts and providing data to steer customers toward the appropriate solutions. 

Brands that retain their most loyal customers and even win the hearts of their frustrated ones are the ones that invest in customer journey orchestration (CJO). 

In this article, we explain what customer journey orchestration means and why many brands do not give importance to CJO (and why they should). ow Contentstack helps orchestrate the customer journey. 

What is customer journey orchestration?

Customer journey orchestration = Omnichannel communication + customer behavior

Let’s understand what it means. 

Customer journey orchestration is understanding your customer's behavior across different channels and platforms. It involves evaluating customers' individual needs and analyzing their omnichannel journey data in real-time to predict the next best engagement and keep customers engaged. 

In simple terms, you use the data obtained to predict the customer’s next course of action. It drives value in each interaction by delivering hyper-personalized interactions and contextual experiences at every digital touchpoint.

Example of customer journey orchestration

An online retail company uses Contentstack’s headless content management system (CMS) to improve customer experience. The retail company gathers data from website activities, e-mails, social media engagement and past purchases. With the help of Contentstack and its enhanced analytics and content management tools, the online store realizes that clients leave the site after adding products to the cart but do not check out. 

To reduce the cart abandonment rate, the store focuses on a customer journey orchestration strategy through Contentstack.

They design a triggered email campaign and send personalized reminders to customers who have abandoned their carts. These emails include images of the products left behind and personalized discount codes to encourage them to buy. They display social media retargeting ads to these customers. On their website, customers read user reviews of products they abandoned.

The orchestration continues post-purchase, with follow-up emails asking for feedback, suggesting complementary products based on past purchases, and offering loyalty rewards. 

Integration across many channels recaptures potential lost sales and builds a stronger, more personalized relationship with the customer. Because of CJO, the online store drives long-term loyalty and increases customer lifetime value.

Customer journey orchestration vs customer journey management

Why is customer journey orchestration important?

When customers receive content every second, CJO can be the difference between success and failure. With CJO, it becomes easier for marketers to cut through the clutter and deliver personalized value in each moment.

With 63% of companies wanting to improve the effectiveness of their customer service journey to meet customer expectations, you’re losing out on improving customer experience by ignoring CJO. Here are the benefits of customer journey orchestration:

Makes you more competitive

Giving your customers many choices allows them to hop from one brand to another. With 3 in every 10 customers switching to your competitor, bad experiences spell disaster and impact how customers perceive your brand. A bad experience translates to lower retention and customer loyalty.

That’s where journey orchestration comes in. It cultivates a customer-centric approach, improving the connection between your brand and customers. Rather than thinking about how your customers will act, journey orchestration helps you listen to:

• What do your customers want?
• How might they interact with a marketing campaign you launch?

Increases meaningful engagement

What’s one thing that makes you different from others? Real-time action based on customer behavior helps you provide a more personalized experience. Using AI and ML techniques, you create unique journeys and meaningful engagements that match each customer’s needs. 

Customers who receive what they want are happy, buy more and become your brand’s most loyal customers. 

Increases revenue

For those who think that CJO only improves customer experience, it scales your business revenue. How?

Long-term merits ensure customers stay loyal since conversion costs are lower. The customer lifetime value, or CLTV, and return on marketing investment or ROMI, increase.  Offering personalized and contextual experience at every touchpoint improves the customer experience and creates a value-driven approach. 

Enhances productivity

A CJO connects all the missing pieces of the puzzle, improving productivity across your company. Apart from improving your customer experience, AI and ML-powered CJOs automate everyday tasks, reducing the need for human intervention. This enhances the efficiency of the various departments.

Customer journey orchestration breaks down barriers between channels and departments to build consistent interactions irrespective of how customers approach your products or services.

Adopting an automation strategy guarantees that each interaction is unique, timely and accurate, which, in turn, has a positive effect on customer satisfaction and loyalty.

How does customer journey orchestration work?

Here's the customer journey orchestration process:

Collects the right data 

Data serves as the fuel for ensuring a great customer experience journey. So, the first step is collecting the right data and information. Brands that provide a consistent customer experience, personalized product recommendations, and tailored communication—all rely on data. 

You can collect data from various sources, such as:

• Transactional data
• Events
• Customer service data
• Customer attributes like address, name, and contact information. 

Integrate the data

When you have collected a lot of data, it’s time to use an appropriate tool that gives you a single viewpoint. For instance, customer relationship management (CRM) and data management platforms (DMPs) help you build the relevant customer persona and provide unique experiences for each customer journey stage.

Interpret the data

Using advanced artificial intelligence and analytics, you convert the data into meaningful insights that meet customer needs and expectations. From the insights you gather, you create dynamic and hyper-personalized marketing campaigns. You automate responses and interactions most relevant to your customer’s stage in the buying cycle. 

Create a customer journey map

Next, you create a customer journey map to showcase each step and interaction a customer has with your brand. Mapping your customer’s journey identifies critical touchpoints and potential pain points, helping you trigger targeted campaigns. 

For instance, if a customer abandons a product in their cart, your system triggers an automated response with a personalized recommendation and special discount. 

Analyze, report and optimize 

Using real-time data is paramount to orchestrate your customer’s journey. 

Imagine a scenario where your customer browses your online store for running shoes. Your analysis should determine that the customer is more likely to respond to a follow-up email about new running apparel or accessories. Using such a personalized approach increases your customer’s experience and the likelihood of conversion.

Understanding which content drives engagements, predicting future customer behavior and optimizing each touchpoint are all key elements contributing to successful omnichannel campaigns and marketing teams. The data insights you gather shape a seamless customer journey tailored to individual customer preferences and needs.

How did Contentstack provide a seamless travel experience for GetYourGuide?

GetYourGuide upgraded its content management platform to Contentstack, delivering faster content across various channels. This adoption allowed marketers to bypass technical barriers, streamline workflows and reduce time spent on support and approvals.

As a result, GetYourGuide now delivers content 90% faster, engages high-value audiences with rich digital experiences and adapts to new travel trends. 

After using Contentstack, Pedro Torres, Product Manager, said: 

“With Contentstack, we can deliver on -- and exceed -- what customers are expecting, regardless of device and consistently deliver those experiences as soon as new travel opportunities become available.”

Read the case study here. 

Challenges with customer journey

Trying to perform everything on your own often trips companies into the following challenges:

Data silos

When your company uses different digital points, you will likely collect customer information across various channels and departments. Scattered information is useless because gaining a unified view of your customers becomes challenging. Data silos reduce your ability to integrate and analyze data, which is the backbone of CJO. 

Technology integration

CJO requires integrating various tools and technologies, such as CRM, customer data platforms and marketing automation. Making these tools and technologies work together is often complex and resource-intensive, requiring investment in your IT tech stack.

Scaling personalization

When your customer base is small, personalization is often a breeze, but as you scale, offering personalized recommendations and tailored messages is next to impossible. Maintaining the accuracy of personalized interactions and engagements as your customer base grows is a significant challenge in your CJO efforts.

Customer journey orchestration tools and technologies

Data collection tool

For effective journey orchestration, you need data-collection tools like a customer data platform or advanced data-collection tools. These tools help you collect the data to decode customer needs and preferences. 

Real-time data analysis tools

Customer journey analytics improves how customers interact with your business. It helps you gather useful information to enhance your customer experience. With these tools, you understand how customers interact with your business on the web, mobile devices, social media and during physical visits to your store. You can identify patterns and problems faced by customers.

Analyzing your data helps you make better decisions to keep customers happy and engaged. Tools like Google Analytics bring together data from various sources. You can integrate it with Contentstack. 

Marketing automation

Use marketing automation platforms to automate and streamline customer interactions across various channels. These tools send personalized messages, trigger automated responses and optimize customer engagement based on real-time data.

Customer journey mapping tool

Customer journey mapping is another great tool. It illustrates how and where the customer communicates with your brand. Using a customer journey mapping tool, you can identify:

• Which stages are critical
• Where customers are getting stuck
• Where you can apply campaign strategy and send personalized message

FAQs

What is a journey orchestration?

Journey orchestration is a process in which companies plan, coordinate and execute their strategies in response to customers’ behaviors. It's a tailored, planned and managed operation that determines how the customer interacts with your company at every stage, from the early point of interaction to the post-purchase stage.

What are the 7 stages of the ideal customer journey?

The seven stages of the customer journey are awareness, consideration, decision, buying, retention, advocacy and re-engagement.

What is the difference between customer journey mapping and customer journey orchestration?

Customer journey mapping represents the customer's interactions with a brand. It outlines all possible touchpoints and channels, identifying improvement opportunities. Customer journey orchestration employs other details from journey maps and other sources to engage the customers in real time.

Learn more

In the customer experience-centric world, customer journey orchestration is necessary, not an afterthought. As more customers crave personalized journeys that resonate with their unique preferences, they prefer engaging with businesses that understand their inclinations and aspirations. 

Optimizing your customer’s journey offers never-before experiences on a grand scale, in real-time, enhancing business outcomes.

Are you ready to orchestrate your customer journey? Request a free demo and witness the power of seamless customer experiences.