I originally wrote today’s post for Concentrix. It recently appeared on their site.
The customer experience never sits still. Just as customer tastes and preferences change, CX is always evolving. According to Adobe’s 2023 Digital Trends Experience Index, “89% of senior executives believe customer experiences are constantly resetting to match their best omnichannel experiences.” The need to exceed your latest and greatest experiences means the bar is constantly being raised.
Given that, it’s imperative that brands understand their customers and know where they are in their journeys and use that knowledge to not only meet them where they are—no matter how far in they are or which channel they’re using—but also deliver the experience they desire. But many brands are struggling to accomplish this, as “42% of organizations believe their customer experience sometimes falls short of customer needs.”
Take A New Approach
There’s a new technique that companies are using to ensure that they don’t fall short. It’s called journey orchestration, and it helps marketers string together customer touch points to gain insights into what customers are doing, how, and where. Those insights are then used to guide customers through the journey, personalize (or rather, orchestrate) the experience for them, and provide them with the information they need at the right place and the right time. In other words, it helps marketers orchestrate next best actions that will deliver the most value for their customers.
We discussed this hot topic and more in the latest episode of Born Digital, which I host. I was joined by three panelists:
- Tom Swanson, Healthcare Industry Leader at Adobe
- Jeff Cram, Healthcare Industry Leader at Concentrix Catalyst
- Shiva Mirhosseini, Former VP, Enterprise MarTech & Digital Experience at CVS Health
We talked about what journey orchestration is, why it’s important, and what it takes to ensure that it’s powerful and effective. Focusing on the healthcare industry, we examined its benefits and use cases, including answering the questions:
- Who owns the journey orchestration work within the organization?
- Who’s doing it well?
- Is customer journey orchestration about anticipating customer steps, influencing their steps, or meeting them where they are?
- Is journey mapping a necessary precursor?
- Why is digital engagement so important in healthcare?
- What’s really required to make journey orchestration as effective as it is meant to be?
- What kind of data is valuable to orchestrate a journey?
What Is Journey Orchestration?
In its simplest form, journey orchestration is about coordinating and managing all of the touchpoints and experiences across the various channels (physical or digital) where customers engage over time.
That coordination starts with collecting the different breadcrumbs of data that customers leave behind as they interact and transact with your brand—data from different channels, sources, or systems—in order to understand their preferences, how they want to be engaged, when they’re being engaged, and what content resonates with them.
Using that data to provide context and to understand your customers across the different channels and then coordinating their experiences in real time so that they can move seamlessly between these channels and continue to have personalized engagement—that’s what journey orchestration is all about.
In a nutshell, journey orchestration enables brands to go beyond the traditional approach to personalization and to start creating actions in real time that optimize customer journeys at scale.
Five Benefits of Journey Orchestration
The benefits of journey orchestration are real, both for the customer and for the brand. By forcing organizations to break down silos to share data across the organization, it enables them to streamline processes and reduce inefficiencies through both automation and coordination of touchpoints. In doing so, they gain insights about customer preferences, behaviors, expectations, and pain points, identifying contextually relevant data, and providing access to that data to the right people at the right time.
We’ve identified five benefits of implementing journey orchestration in your organization. They include:
- A more seamless, consistent, and personalized experience for the customer across all touchpoints, leading to increased engagement and satisfaction, and
- A better experience for employees, as well.
- A reduction in the number of customers who abandon what they’re doing because you’re eliminating friction points.
- An increase in the percentage of customers who achieve their desired outcomes because you have insights about them and where they are in the journey that you use to deliver next best experiences.
- Easier and more fulfilling jobs for employees because they have the tools and the resources to help customers do just that.
Journey orchestration makes for a better experience all around, but for it to truly be as effective as it’s meant to be, there are a few requirements. In our latest Born Digital episode, we talked in detail about the critical requirements needed to be successful with journey orchestration, as well as how organizational maturity plays an important factor. “It’s an evolution, not a revolution.”
Be sure to check out the episode here to learn more about journey orchestration and for specific examples of how it’s being used in healthcare.
Digitalization implies the full-scale changes in the way business is conducted so that it’s a multi-dimensional planning and orchestration. ~ Pearl Zhu
About Annette
Image courtesy of Concentrix.
