What is Customer Journey Orchestration? Key Elements, Strategies & Examples
Prashanth Kancherla
Dec 19, 2023
The customer journey’s impact on business success can’t be overstated. It’s especially important in sales and service departments, where the experience clients have with staff effectively defines their likelihood of making future purchases.
In an effort to reduce attrition and bolster brand loyalty, many companies are making Customer Journey Orchestration (CJO) initiatives a core part of their business strategy. This article will take a deep dive into what it is, how it works, the benefits that come with implementing it well, and the challenges and tools that define the process of getting started.
In this article, we will explore:
- 1. What Is Customer Journey Orchestration?
- 2. How Customer Journey Orchestration Works
- 3. What the Typical Customer Journey Consists of?
- 4. Examples of Customer Journey Orchestration
- 5. The Importance of Customer Journey Orchestration In Business Strategy
- 6. Customer Journey Orchestration Vs Customer Journey Management
- 7. Why Is Customer Journey Orchestration Effective?
- 8. The Key Elements of Customer Journey Orchestration Success
- 9. Benefits of Customer Journey Orchestration
- 10. Challenges to Customer Journey Orchestration
- 11. How a Cloud Call Center Solution Can Help Your Customer Journey Orchestration Efforts
What Is Customer Journey Orchestration?
Customer Journey Orchestration (CJO) is the process of providing a unified, personalized experience for customers throughout their entire lifecycle that optimizes both user satisfaction and business goals. It enables companies to create a holistic, connected experience for customers. It includes the use of customer data, automation, and analytics to understand the individual preferences of each customer and tailor their interactions accordingly.
At its core, Customer Journey Orchestration works to ensure customers receive consistent, seamless service across all channels. It’s thought that by using the strategy to understand customer behavior and preferences, companies can build a unified experience that keeps customers engaged and increases customer loyalty.
That’s incredibly important in today’s competitive environment, as a unified customer experience is essential for businesses that need to differentiate themselves from their competition.
How Customer Journey Orchestration Works
Customer Journey Orchestration offers a way to manage the entire customer journey, from the moment they become aware of a product or service, through purchase and beyond. The key is to look at things on a holistic level; while traditional approaches to customer retention might look at things on a case-by-case basis, this strategy takes more of a storytelling-oriented approach. It considers how each stage of an individual’s experience factors into the attitudes and beliefs that will ultimately lead to conversion.
The concept of orchestration incorporates several different marketing disciplines, including email, social media, content creation/distribution, and analytics. All of these channels are used in alignment with a greater strategy to cultivate relationships with customers and ideally form long-lasting connections.
What Constitutes a Typical Customer Journey?
The customer journey starts when someone first becomes aware of a product or service, and this is usually through exposure to promotional materials like ads, emails, or social content. From there the goal is to keep them engaged with the brand through frequent, relevant communication. This might mean providing them with useful content or ongoing discounts and offers.
Call centers have a big role to play in maintaining the positive impressions touchpoints before them have built. Clients actively phone in because they need help with something, have a question to ask, or want to make a request of some kind.
This goes beyond the passive experience of coming across digital ads and emails to a more direct, personal one-on-one exchange. Failing to act on promises, offering insufficient advice, or being unhelpful can all wipe out a business’ reputation in the eyes of its customers, no matter how strong its upstream touchpoints are.
Examples of Customer Journey Orchestration
Now that we’re clear on what customer journey orchestration is, let’s illustrate it in real-world terms using some examples.
Creating Awareness
One of India’s leading gold loan NBFC Muthoot Fincorp wanted to build awareness and engage both new and existing customers digitally and implement a zero-inventory model for the jewelry vertical. The company deployed Ozonetel’s CCaaS Platform for WhatsApp, voice bots, and other customer engagement strategies to build awareness and create positive engagement in a lean, agile, and cost-effective manner. As a result, the average order value increased from Rs 20,000 to Rs 50,000, WhatsApp garnered over 150,000 impressions in 9 months and voice bot made over 43,500 EMI collection calls in 5 months leading to significant savings.
Lead Optimization
One of India’s top NBFC engaged in consumer and MSME financing wanted to minimize the lead response time. Earlier, the company had to manually update digital leads into their dialers, causing a gap of 12-24 hours between a prospect’s web inquiry and receiving a call. They later automated the process, but there was still a connectivity lag of 2 hours. Through a deep integration of CRM & Ozonetel dialers, every single digital lead receives a call within 15 minutes. Conversion rate increased from 3-4% to 10% (3X increase), a notable improvement in BFSI.
Targeted Engagement
In order to improve conversion rates, Redcliffe Labs needed to identify leads with the highest potential. With our solution, they were able to filter out junk leads (30% of the total leads) with 95% accuracy. Through source identification, agents can tailor their scripts accordingly. With intelligent routing & call logic, the system could now direct incoming leads to the most suitable agent, considering factors like demographics, skills, and the patient’s diagnostic requirements. As a result, the customer engagement score almost doubled, resulting in a 40% increase in sales over twelve months.
Personalized Experiences
Insurtech firm Acko wanted to turn processes like claims, inquiries, and renewals into seamless, reassuring experiences for their customers. They understood that customers go through varying emotions during interactions related to claim settlements, roadside assistance, and other policy-related queries. The best way forward was to deeply understand customer needs. They leveraged Ozonetel’s smart IVR solution that preemptively deduced the reason for an incoming call. They utilized CRM data to study customer attributes such as policy duration, expiry date, possibility of a claim and accordingly route them to the most relevant branch of the IVR tree. Further, the agents were provided the right context before calls. This has resulted in 50% faster resolutions and over 90% CSAT.
Efficient Customer Service
A stockbroking firm suffered regular outages during market shakeouts, especially when call volumes peaked. They were struggling to maintain high uptime and deliver business continuity, resulting in customer service disruptions. They switched to our robust CX platform that automates callbacks, offers self-service, and handles high and fluctuating call volumes with ease. As a result, 40% queries were automated through self-service IVR, and the abandonment rate decreased by 58%. Read More.
Higher Customer Retention
BigBasket maintains an industry-leading customer retention rate of 85 percent. The e-commerce firm leverages our CX platform to answer customer calls within seconds and capture critical customer data so that they can continually improve and reduce customer complaints. They use technologies such as route optimization, intelligent planning, and advanced analytics to provide agents with the tools they need to provide efficient. “Collaborations with partners like Ozonetel have been instrumental. They’ve not only delivered the required technological infrastructure but have also customized it to align seamlessly with our needs and the preferences of our valued customers in the grocery sector,” said BigBasket co-founder Vipul Parekh.
Our unified CX platform offers a comprehensive suite of features specifically crafted to enhance experiences during the critical moments of truth in the customer journey.
The Importance of Customer Journey Orchestration In Business Strategy
CJO is quickly becoming an essential part of modern customer experience management strategies as it helps companies stay competitive and retain customers in the increasingly crowded digital landscape. Everyone has something to offer, and the wealth of resources out there today makes it easy for virtually anyone to start their own business.
You can’t put your best product or service forward and expect people to know it’s the market’s top option; customers are hard to earn and easy to lose when they have multiple alternatives. Investing in experiences that engage, impress, and meet expectations is the only way to ensure buyers remain loyal. It can almost be thought of as a form of insurance, where the money put into CJO serves to protect all of a business’ other pursuits in marketing, sales, and product.
Customer Journey Orchestration Vs Customer Journey Management
| Aspect | Customer Journey Orchestration | Customer Journey Management |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Creative side of customer experience | Execution aspects of customer experience |
| Objective | Creating a personalized experience for consumers | Delivering on customer journey orchestration efforts |
| Data | Uses data to create a narrative that guides people through the sales funnel | Collects and analyzes customer feedback to create real-time actionable insights |
| Channels | Focuses on crafting a narrative across all channels | Requires an organized approach to collecting data from all channels |
| Subset | Sometimes considered an extension or subset of customer journey management | Encompasses all the activities required to optimize and execute a customer journey |
To the uninitiated, customer journey orchestration and customer journey management might seem like the same thing. Both have to do with individuals’ experience with a brand, right? While that’s one obvious commonality, the truth is that each practice has its own unique purpose and benefits.
Let’s disseminate the differences together.
Customer journey orchestration covers the creative side of customer experience, while Customer journey management focuses on the execution aspects. You already know that customer journey orchestration is about creating a personalized experience for consumers – it’s about crafting a narrative that guides people through the sales funnel as many times over as possible.
Customer journey management tackles the data-driven side of personalization. It involves collecting and analyzing customer feedback, using it to create real-time actionable insights, and then executing those insights in order to better engage customers along their journeys. It’s the practice of actually delivering on those customer journey orchestration efforts, and it requires an organized approach to collecting data from all channels (email, web, mobile etc.)
Customer journey orchestration is sometimes considered an extension or subset of customer journey management. The latter practice encompasses all the activities required to optimize and execute a customer journey, while the former is more focused on creating a narrative around that journey.
Why Is Customer Journey Orchestration Effective?
Customer journey orchestration proves itself effective in numerous ways. The great thing about it is that its applications are almost limitless. It can be used to streamline customer service efforts, provide customers with more tailored experiences, optimize user flows throughout a website or app interface, increase operational efficiency, and automate processes so they don’t require manual intervention.
We go over the key characteristics that make customer journey orchestration such a valuable tool in the modern business’ toolkit below.
A Flexible Solution
Customer journey orchestration is often considered to be much more effective than conventional client satisfaction and retention strategies because of its flexibility and scalability. It’s important to understand that customers aren’t all the same, so what works for one may not be effective for another.
It allows businesses to personalize experiences based on individual customer needs and preferences, while also forming relationships and building trust. By taking into account customer behavior, businesses can better predict their needs and provide them with relevant products or services to meet those needs on an ongoing basis.
Promotes Efficiency
CJO encourages the use of automated processes and tools which save time, money, and resources. Tracking data points such as purchase history, browsing behavior, location data, and interests can help businesses build better profiles for their customers, allowing them to target specific audiences with tailored offers. Automation also reduces the number of manual processes, thereby freeing up employee resources to focus on more valuable tasks.
Drives Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
A big part of why companies choose to pursue CJO is because of its potential to increase
Customer Lifetime Value, or CLV. This refers to the total amount of money that a customer will spend over the course of their lifetime on a brand’s products or services. Ideally, you want to maximize the CLV of each customer as much as possible.
With CJO, you can increase the CLV of your customers by providing them with discounts and offers that are tailored to their needs and interests. This way, they’re more likely to continue coming back for more purchases in the future instead of just making a one-time purchase.
The Key Elements of Customer Journey Orchestration Success
Success in customer journey orchestration is a matter of how well you know your customer. Strategies are supposed to be proactive and predictive by nature so as to satisfy individuals’ needs before they even recognize they have them.
Here are the core pillars that go into the planning process:
Data and Behavioral Insights
Creating a customer-centric experience requires having an intimate understanding of each target demographic, their habits and preferences, and what motivates them to take action.
Most effective CJO strategies start with the collection of both explicit and implicit data. Explicit data refers to pieces of information that can be easily collected from customers through customer feedback forms, surveys, and user-generated content. Common examples include customer demographics, purchase history, previous interactions with a product or service, and more.
Implicit data is a bit harder to collect as it consists of unspoken information that customers give off through their behavior. Things like website navigation paths, online buying habits, and usage statistics can be used to gain a better understanding of customer preferences and behaviors.
Combining the data from both explicit and implicit sources is essential for establishing a powerful CJO strategy. Businesses can leverage it in all kinds of ways, from developing personalized customer experiences to creating targeted campaigns and offers to crafting unique product recommendations.
Well-Defined Goals and Performance Metrics
While the impacts and intricacies of a customer’s journeys with a business can be looked at in both a tangible and intangible way, businesses need to ensure they have a well-defined set of goals and performance metrics in place to measure the progress and success of their CJO efforts.
These metrics should be designed with insight into customer expectations as well as what your business actually needs to improve or sustain its operations. Key performance indicators (KPIs) such as customer retention, brand loyalty, and average order value should be established along with more business-specific targets like website visits or time-on-site.
Teamwork and Collaboration
Customer journey orchestration efforts – or any kind of business strategy, for that matter – are only ever as effective as the teams behind them are well-coordinated and aligned. So it’s important to ensure that everyone involved is working together in a cohesive manner, with shared goals and objectives.
Bringing different teams from different departments (such as marketing, customer service, IT) together can be challenging, but it’s essential for a successful CJO strategy. Communication and collaboration must be established among all stakeholders in order to ensure that everyone is on the same page about goals, strategies, and processes.
Automation
No matter how good a company’s intentions are, the fact of the matter is that no organization can deliver perfect customer service 100 percent of the time in this day and age – at least not the old-fashioned way. Tens, hundreds, and even thousands of people can all interact with a business simultaneously, making it impossible to meet everyone’s expectations on a consistent basis without some kind of technological assistance.
That’s why automation plays a key role in the modern CJO strategy. Automation technologies like chatbots and virtual assistants allow companies to respond quickly and accurately to customer inquiries, without adding any additional strain on human resources. They can also be used to personalize customer experiences by providing tailored product recommendations or targeted offers.
While there’s certainly an added expense of time and money required to implement automation for customer journey orchestration initiatives, most businesses would consider it well spent given the risks of failing to satisfy customer needs.
Benefits of Customer Journey Orchestration
Customer journey orchestration isn’t some niche marketing concept with no merits to back up its implementation. Businesses of all sizes can benefit from it, and in more ways than one. Read below to learn more about the many advantages that come with making this concept a part of your own internal operations.
Improved Customer Experiences
The single greatest benefit to customer journey orchestration is improved customer experience. Every step of the customer journey can be tracked and improved with CJO, leading to better experiences for your target audience. This could be anything from sending personalized emails, to providing additional support when customers are confused or frustrated.
Increased Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
We alluded to this earlier; Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a metric used to measure the total value of a customer over their time in your sales funnel. An effective CJO system will help you increase CLV by understanding where and when customers are most likely to engage, as well as how often they tend to make purchases. When met in the right places at the right times on a consistent basis, it’s easier to convert prospects into customers and increase your CLV in the process.
Adaptability and Flexibility
It allows businesses to adapt to changing customer needs and market dynamics. The flexibility to adjust strategies based on real-time data ensures continued relevance and effectiveness in the customer journey. By breaking down silos and providing deeper levels of personalization, businesses can provide deliver superior experiences across the buyer journey.
Data-driven Insights
It leverages data analytics to provide valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences. This data-driven approach enables businesses to make informed decisions and optimizations. For example, by analyzing customer data across channels, businesses can update customer profiles and accordingly change targeting characteristics ensuring a dynamic and responsive approach to customer interactions throughout their journey.
Effective Targeting and Personalization
One of the key advantages of orchestrating customer journey is its ability to help you better identify and segment customers for more effective targeting. Studying customer behavior and creating personas based on it is a crucial part of CJO, helping you better understand and anticipate the needs of your different customer segments.
With the right data, you can tailor your messaging to highly specific segments and increase conversions accordingly. This is more effective than a blanket approach that doesn’t consider individual customer needs.
Challenges to Customer Journey Orchestration
While there are numerous benefits to be reaped by doing so, implementing customer journey orchestration is far from easy. It requires far more than just reading up on the topic or broadly applying best practices. Businesses need to take a serious look at how their specific organization operates and how their customers interact with it in order to be successful.
Legacy Systems
Legacy systems pose a significant challenge to customer journey orchestration. The inability of disparate and outdated systems to effectively communicate and integrate hampers the seamless flow of information. Therefore, businesses need to invest in cloud-based call center solutions to orchestrate the customer journey effectively.
Adapting to Customer Behavior Changes
Customer behavior is dynamic. Adapting strategies to align with evolving customer preferences and behaviors is a continuous challenge in ensuring relevance and engagement throughout the customer journey. Therefore, businesses need to adopt a proactive approach to deeply understand and respond to the evolving expectations and behaviors of the customers.
Disjointed Customer Experiences
While customer data platforms (CDPs) have improved customer experiences, overcoming reactivation and disjointed interactions remains a persistent challenge. There is a need to think beyond data and focus on creating seamless, integrated experiences. This involves not only gathering information but also strategically implementing it to ensure a cohesive and unified customer journey.
Consistency Across Channels
Maintaining a consistent customer experience across multiple channels is difficult. Inconsistencies can arise in messaging, branding, and interactions, impacting the overall journey. Businesses need to prioritize the need for conversational continuity. This involves creating a unified experience where customers can transition effortlessly between channels while maintaining a consistent and personalized engagement.
Data Collection and Management
Collecting and managing large amounts of data from different sources like web browsing, social media posts, surveys etc. can be a difficult task. This data needs to be structured and analyzed in order for the insights from these customer journeys to have any value. The complexity arises from the need to ensure data accuracy, relevance, and compliance while handling substantial volumes of information.
Analytics
Capturing and analyzing data from customer journeys is only useful if businesses are able to interpret it in meaningful ways. The challenge here lies in the fact that analytics need to be constantly updated and modified according to new insights, trends, and customer requests. Adapting analytics strategies to remain relevant and effective requires an approach that aligns with the changing customer behavior and expectations.
How a Cloud Call Center Solution Can Help Your Customer Journey Orchestration Efforts
Customer journey orchestration is a complex endeavor that requires both leaders and tools with
the right capabilities to work. A cloud call center solution can be an invaluable asset in this regard, acting as a platform to connect with customers on their channels of choice while collecting customer feedback in real-time. Ozonetel’s unified, full stack CX is an easy choice for businesses of all sizes
Looking to optimize their sales and service journeys? Our platform offers a wealth of advanced features that make staying on top of – and even better, proactively satisfying – your customers’ needs a breeze. Reach out to a member of the team to learn more about what we can do for your business.
Ready to improve CX at every step of the customer experience?
Frequently Asked Questions
Customer journey orchestration i is the strategic and holistic process of designing, monitoring, and optimizing the end-to-end customer experience across various touchpoints. It involves leveraging data, analytics, and automation to create personalized and seamless interactions that align with both customer needs and overarching business goals.
CX orchestration refers to the strategic coordination of customer experiences across multiple channels and interactions. It involves aligning various touchpoints, channels, and communication methods to provide a unified and personalized experience that meets customer expectations at every stage.
Journey orchestration and Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) serve distinct purposes. Journey orchestration involves designing and optimizing customer experiences, while CDPs focus on collecting, unifying, and managing customer data to provide a comprehensive view. Both complement each other for a holistic customer engagement strategy.
Customer journey mapping visualizes the stages and touchpoints of a customer’s interaction with a brand. It offers insights into their experience and interactions throughout the entire journey.
On the other hand, customer journey orchestration is a strategic approach to actively manage and optimize these journeys by using data, analytics, and automation to deliver personalized and cohesive experiences.
Ozonetel unified CX platform provides tools & technology for seamless customer journey orchestration. Through advanced analytics, automation, and omnichannel communication, Ozonetel empowers businesses to design, implement, and optimize personalized customer journeys. With capabilities such as intelligent call routing, real-time analytics, and seamless CRM integration, Ozonetel empowers businesses to deliver personalized and efficient customer service.
