7 Data-Driven Ways to Improve Customer Journey Orchestration

Customer data platforms have enabled organizations to improve their customer journey management abilities. With a better understanding of data across channels, businesses can rapidly update customer profiles and almost instantly change targeting characteristics and customer touchpoints.

But despite improvements made possible by CDPs, new research from Treasure Data suggests that siloed systems, reactivation and disjointed customer experiences remain ongoing challenges when keeping up with changing consumer needs.

Companies must now move beyond simply using data to understand the customer journey. They must orchestrate them by breaking down silos to provide deeper levels of personalization that’s relevant to real-time buying behaviors. This need is changing the way customer journey leaders view the martech stack, with 62 percent of organizations somewhat or extremely likely to adopt tools that allow them to aggregate all of their customer journey data within one location.

What does customer journey orchestration look like?

Customer journey orchestration works across all stages of the customer lifecycle. Consider, for example, buying a car.

First, there is a paid media and/or social media-based engagement at the “unaware” or “acquisition” phase. This is where a shopper becomes aware of the brand via a series of media exposures. Once the shopper visits the car company’s website and fills out a form, an awareness journey begins. When the shopper goes to the dealership to set up a test drive, this could trigger bottom-funnel conversion tactics that focus on the benefits of the relevant vehicles that the individual is considering.

These experiences are tailored to the individual based on their most recent interactions with the brand, regardless of whether the interaction takes place on a website, at a dealership, through social media, or via a phone call to the contact center. The timing, channels, and content of the customer journey are personalized based on all previous interactions to fit the customer’s preferences and needs for maximum relevance and impact. Customers learn about the product that is most likely to interest them, at the pace that they want to go.

Choosing the right customer journey orchestration tools 

Customer journey management means different things for different organizations. At Treasure Data, we’ve identified seven ways to achieve effective customer journey orchestration, and the types of tools needed to achieve those goals.

1. Take an omnichannel approach
   Enable journey orchestration across channels and business units to deliver a seamless, personalized journey across the full customer lifecycle. Look for a CDP that provides adequate customer context across channels and lifecycle stages to create a frictionless experience and enhance the quality of customer interactions.
2. Unite customer data
   Unite customer data and insights to make individual touchpoints smarter. Unified data allows the ability to suggest the next best action in a customer’s journey, like the right channel to engage with personalized messaging, or the right product or service to offer, improving sales, marketing ROI, and boosting customer retention. Some non-CDP customer journey orchestration tools often rely on a limited set of data and insights, with inconsistent rules defined for each channel. Look for tools that can broaden your dataset to provide deeper levels of personalization and smarter recommendations.
3. Use predictive analytics
   Combine customer data and predictive analytics to create different customer journeys based on predicted customer lifetime value, whether it’s loyal, high-value customers, new or lapsed customers, and customers with a high likelihood to churn.
4. Make messaging consistent
   Empower marketers to deliver different omnichannel experiences to different types of customers. Through orchestration, marketers can ensure messaging remains consistent and contextual at the right stage of the customer journey, delivered through a customer’s preferred channel to interact.
5. Adapt quickly to customer needs
   When a customer buys, converts, or has significant interactions, a good customer journey orchestration tool quickly registers the change, updates the profile, and triggers other specialized martech to activate their capabilities. For example, activating an email or text management platform to send appropriate customized communications.
6. Design for flexibility
   Tools should integrate seamlessly with a wide range of technologies to leverage the special capabilities of each platform, while updating a centralized database. Ideally, orchestration tools are developed with flexibility in mind, accommodating the addition of new tools and channels over time to enable a future-proof customer journey system.
7. Make it easy to use
   Equip marketing operations teams to do more. No-coding-required capabilities and easy-to-use interfaces make it easier to scale, integrate, and deploy without relying on IT or data engineers.

Customer journey management requires coordination across different parts of the organization, with data used to uncover insights and drive decisions at every step of the buying experience. Orchestration takes this a step further by aligning people and processes to drive consistent, relevant, and engaging customer experiences.

To learn more about the future of customer journey management, explore the full report here. To learn more about Treasure Data’s customer journey management capabilities, request a demo now.