Customer Journey Orchestration
let's take a look at how customer journey orchestration is changing the nature of marketing and sales. We'll cover everything from the basics of understanding customer journeys to how technology has made it possible for companies to begin creating their own customer journey experiences.
The customer journey
The customer journey is the path a customer takes to realize a goal. It's not just steps, but the experience they have along the way with your brand. A single, unified story that reflects who you are and what you do. Think of your customer journey as a series of interconnected steps:
Identifying a problem or need
Researching solutions
Selecting solution (you)
Taking action (buying/subscribing)
Experiencing value from the solution
Customer journey orchestration
Customer journey orchestration is the process of integrating disparate tools and channels to deliver a seamless customer experience. In other words, it's about how you use technology (and human beings!) to make sure that your customers get the right information at the right time.
Think of it this way: Customer journey orchestration is like putting together a massive puzzle with thousands of pieces. You have all these different puzzle pieces, some small and some big, but there's no picture on the box showing what should be assembled first or how they fit together in an overall picture. The challenge comes from determining which pieces belong together based on their size and color before attempting to assemble them into one cohesive image.
Customer journey experience design
Customer experience design is:
The process of creating a holistic customer experience.
You must design a holistic approach to creating a customer experience that's relevant, seamless, and personalized. It's the process of putting together all the data from across your business in order to better understand your customers and where they're at in their journey with your brand.
Is a key component of the customer journey orchestration.
This enables you to create more relevant experiences for them as they go through their journey with your company.
About connecting the dots between a customer’s expectations, their behavior, and their experience with your company or product.
As a marketer, it’s your job to connect the dots between a customer’s expectations, their behavior, and their experience with your company or product. And that means understanding where they are in the customer journey, so you can deliver on their needs.
Breaking the rules of the customer journey
Customer journey orchestration is a departure from the traditional customer journey approach. In this section, we'll review:
Why the customer journey can't be described as linear, one-way, or funneled.
The traditional customer journey (traditional marketing funnel) is linear, one-way, and funneled:
The user goes through a series of steps (A→B→C→D) to reach an end goal. The user has no control over this process; it's entirely up to the business to decide what happens next.
The problem is that the concept of a linear journey doesn't fit with how people actually behave online — or offline for that matter. A person does not necessarily start at one point on your site, then follow a single path through your site until they reach another point at which they either convert or leave forever.
People don’t tend to behave like this because human beings are complex creatures who are capable of making decisions on the fly and changing their minds about things at any time depending on what happens around them — or inside them — at any given moment in time.
The customer journey in today's world is much more complex than this traditional model suggests. It's not just about getting people from A to B — it's about creating an ongoing relationship with them so they will come back again and again.
Why the customer experience should be thought of in terms of cycles.
Customer journeys are a popular topic right now, but they’re often misunderstood. Why? Because they’re not really the journey the customer takes; they’re the journey your business takes with a customer.
This is why it’s so important to think of your customer experience as a series of cycles: The customer moves through different phases of their journey, and your business must adapt accordingly.
The Customer Journey Cycle
The first step to understanding how you can improve your customer experience is to realize that your customers don’t exist on a linear path. They move in circles — sometimes big ones, sometimes small ones. And those circles take place over time.
For example, here’s what a typical cycle might look like for someone who wants to learn more about digital marketing before deciding whether or not to hire an agency:
Searches online for “digital marketing agency” and lands on your website; reads about what services you offer; reviews testimonials from actual clients; reads about your pricing structure; clicks through to check out more about your team members and bios; reads about what kind of work you do for clients; clicks through some case studies so she can get an idea
Orchestrating a multichannel customer experience
Customer experience is more than just a marketing discipline. It's become the predominant means by which brand and business objectives are realized. But it's not just about marketing, technology or customer service—it's about how all three of those disciplines work together to deliver an exceptional multichannel journey for your customers.
Armed with this new perspective on customer experience orchestration, you can more easily identify where you're falling short and take steps to ensure that your organization is delivering the best possible experience across every channel.
Takeaway
The customer experience is more than just a marketing discipline. It's become the predominant means by which brand and business objectives are realized.
Customer experience is not just about marketing, it's about the entire customer journey.
Your customers don't care about you per see... —they care about themselves, and they want to be served in their time of need (or even before they realize they have a need). This can come down to a multitude of factors even how your brand morally aligns with the customer based on your business decisions.
More…
If you find yourself interested in this topic and would like to explore it further you can start by exploring these complementing resources:
