Marketers are especially focused on the latter stages of the journey, with an eye toward fostering relationships that yield recurring revenue. CJO tools are designed to include touchpoints like interactions with customer success representatives, who often deliver the experience supporting those long-term relationships.

Dig deeper: What is customer journey analytics?

The end-to-end customer journey

More broadly, businesses are recognizing that adequate customer experiences are becoming table stakes, making it more difficult to achieve differentiation that drives business success. Yet, few marketers are successfully satisfying customers in all phases of their relationship. 

A full thirty-one percent of marketers surveyed by Gartner said they end their journey maps with the purchase, the lead acquisition, the initial transaction or the delivery of the product or service.

“A journey map that focuses merely on the purchase funnel, and not the entire end-to-end customer journey, is not a CX journey map,” said Augie Ray, VP and analyst with Gartner’s Marketing practice. “Those sorts of journey maps may assist with efforts to build awareness, inbound traffic and acquisition, but they cannot uncover the opportunities that influence customer satisfaction, loyalty and long-term advocacy.”

Raising the stakes with the customer journey during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic raised the stakes. Before the pandemic, most customers — both consumers and business buyers — had already interacted online for many years, which means they have a bank of experiences to draw upon when evaluating new interactions. 

They know what an online check-out should be like; they have researched business purchases; they have gone through the process of signing up for a new bank account online, etc. So merely adequate experiences aren’t enough to differentiate one brand from another.

During the pandemic, more people became accustomed to conveniences like buy-online pick-up-in-store or curbside deliveries from restaurants and retail locations. Eighty-eight percent of customers expect companies to accelerate digital initiatives as a result of COVID, with 69% of those surveyed expecting new ways to get existing products and services and 54% believing businesses should offer entirely new products and services, Salesforce found in the “State of the Connected Customer” report.

Forrester Research calls it the “most frenzied phase of innovation” consumer-facing businesses have ever experienced, in a report aptly titled “Vast, Fast and Relentless,” warning brands that “customers won’t let you rest anytime soon.”

To break through and engender customer loyalty, businesses must develop a deeper understanding of their customers’ journeys, as well as the motivations and values that drive them to engage. Critically, the customer journey doesn’t end with the purchase, so users’ experience with products and customer service interactions affect the lifetime value of that customer.

It’s these later stages that marketers are focusing on when they shift to existing customers during the pandemic and beyond.

Download the full MarTech Intelligence Report: Enterprise Customer Journey Orchestration Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide

The post Using customer journey orchestration to engage existing customers during the pandemic appeared first on MarTech.

Researching customer journey orchestration

Here are the important steps in evaluating your company’s current CJO capabilities and conducting research on solutions.

Make a list of current capabilities. Make a list of all the CJO capabilities you currently have, those that you would like to have and those that you can’t live without. This last category is critical and will help you avoid making a costly mistake. For example, if you seek to harness the data coming from your call center, make sure to ask vendors about their capabilities in this area, and their ability to perform sentiment analysis on the conversations happening in that channel.

Take your list of capabilities and then do some research. Speak to your marketing peers at industry events to find out who is using which tool and why. Many vendors profiled in The MarTech Intelligence Report on CJO provide whitepapers and interactive tools that can help.

Narrow your list to those vendors that meet your criteria. Submit your list of the critical capabilities you’ve identified, and set a timeframe for them to reply.

Decide whether or not you need to engage in a formal RFI/RFP process. This is an individual preference. If you run a formal process, be sure to give the same list of capabilities to each vendor to facilitate an apples-to-apples comparison.

The most effective RFPs only request relevant information and provide ample information about your brand and its needs. It should reflect high-level strategic goals and KPIs. For example, mention your company’s most important KPIs and how you will evaluate the success of your CJO efforts. Include details about timelines and the existing martech systems you have deployed.

When written properly, an RFP will facilitate the sales process and ensure that everyone involved on both sides comes to a shared understanding of the purpose, requirements, scope and structure of the intended purchase. From the RFP responses, you should be able to narrow your list down to three or four solutions that you’ll want to demo.

Questions to ask vendors

Set up demos with your short list of vendors within a relatively short time frame after receiving the RFP responses. Make sure that all potential internal users are on the demo call, and pay attention to the following:

• How easy is the tool to use?
• Does the vendor seem to understand our business and our marketing needs?
• Are they showing us our “must-have” features?

Other questions to ask each vendor depending on the type of services they provide include:

Data gathering

• Does the solution integrate with the systems you currently use to store customer data?
• What type of machine learning and/or artificial intelligence does the tool use?
• Are we able to choose different models and tune them to our own needs?
• Can we segment and view customers by multiple criteria?
• Can the tool identify anonymous interactions and match them to the correct profile?
• Does the tool allow us to reconcile data from all of the channels in which we interact with customers?
• Is the solution GDPR and CCPA compliant?

Reporting

• Does the solution provide real-time analytics?
• What do the reports look like and how can they be customized?
• Does the tool use artificial intelligence and machine learning? How?
• Is sentiment analysis of relevant customer interactions available?
• What types of insights are surfaced through analysis and what recommendations does the tool make proactively?

Real-time interaction management

• How does the tool natively orchestrate interactions or integrate with the systems we use (i.e. display ad management, content management systems)?
• How is data exchanged? Are real-time or near real-time personalized or segmented campaigns feasible?

Training and customer support

• How much training will we need to use the software, and what kind of training is available?
• What level of customer support do you offer, and when is it available (i.e., 24/7 vs. 8/5)?
• What is the turnaround time for support queries/tickets?
• Do you provide professional services or support for our transition?
• What new features are you considering?
• What’s the long-term product roadmap and launch dates?

Download the full MarTech Intelligence Report: Enterprise Customer Journey Orchestration Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide

The post Questions to ask vendors before buying a customer journey orchestration solution appeared first on MarTech.

Before beginning the process, it’s important to know the different kinds of benefits associated with CJO solutions.

The benefits of using CJO tools

Adopting a platform that gathers, visualizes, analyzes and acts upon data across all of your customer touchpoints can yield significant benefits. Here are some of these benefits.

Improved alignment among business units. Committing to customer journey analytics and orchestration requires that every business function — marketing, sales, customer service, product development — contribute data on the points where they touch the customer throughout the life cycle. This knowledge sharing and coordination, as well as the insights gained by doing so, can help align the various business units by giving them a common view of the customer and allowing them to agree to overarching goals.

Increased revenue. At its most basic level, customer journey orchestration can enable businesses to identify roadblocks that are preventing prospects from making purchases, thereby improving return on marketing investment. More broadly, however, truly understanding your customer and focusing on providing them with what they’re seeking for the duration of your relationship can pay dividends for the longer term, resulting in cross-sells, up-sells, repeat purchases and brand advocacy.

More agile marketing and operations. The rapid changes in social and purchase behavior brought about by the COVID pandemic served as a lesson to many business leaders, hammering home the importance of listening to customers and prospects in real-time. The data and insights gathered through practices like customer journey orchestration allow businesses to more quickly pivot to respond to customer needs as the environment changes.

Dig Deeper: Using AI to improve customer experience and CJO

A better relationship with your customer. Some of the biggest trends to emerge from the COVID pandemic have nothing to do with illness or even working from home. All of the shake-ups to our normal routines, as well as the re-examination prompted by social movements like Black Lives Matter, have customers looking for a different type of relationship with the businesses they patronize. This is manifesting in two ways.

Multiple surveys indicate that customers are seeking businesses that understand them — that empathize with their needs. One in four respondents to a Deloitte global consumer survey strongly agreed that they walked away from brands they believe acted in self-interest. “Simultaneously, more than 70% agreed that they valued the digital innovations that deepened their connection with others during COVID-19,” Deloitte’s 2021 Global Marketing Trends report said.

Additionally, customers are increasingly turning to businesses whose values align with their own, such as those that commit to addressing systemic racism and inequality. Though customer journey orchestration solutions can’t make a business more human, empathetic or socially conscious, they can help businesses understand their customers’ values and concerns. They can also help them express that understanding when they interact with customers.

Do you need a CJO tool?

After fully understanding the benefits that CJO can offer an organization, it’s time to ask questions specifically about your business.

Deciding whether or not your company needs a CJO tool calls for the same evaluative steps involved in any software adoption, including a comprehensive self-assessment of your organization’s business needs, staff capabilities, management support and financial resources.

Use the following questions as a guideline to determine the answers.

Have we identified our goals for CJO? Implementing a customer journey analytics program can provide many benefits, but it’s critical that you reflect on what you want to achieve with this investment. Do you want to optimize your marketing spend? Are you seeking to improve customer lifetime value?

Does your organization have a culture that ensures all of the relevant departments will support CJO and contribute siloed data as necessary? The success of a customer journey orchestration depends on participation from all touchpoints — marketing, sales, customer service, etc. Does your organization have a culture that will support participation?

Do we have C-suite buy-in? Adopting customer journey analytics, as mentioned above, requires the cooperation of multiple departments within the organization. Therefore, having a C-suite advocate that can help establish the program as a priority across departments, is critical for success.

Who will “own” CJO? Marketing, sales, product and customer service must all contribute, and all can benefit, but you’ll need to decide who is leading the charge.

Can we invest in organizational training? Many of the benefits of customer journey analytics can only be realized through shifting the way businesses think about their customers — by adopting a customer-first focus. Changing perspectives throughout the business may require training and education, as well as long-term changes in processes.

Have we established KPIs and put a system in place for tracking, measuring and reporting results? Once you’ve established your goals and communicated them throughout the organization, you’ll need to decide on the metrics that are most important to your efforts and monitor your progress in achieving them. You may consider doing a proof-of-concept with low-hanging fruit to demonstrate the benefits of the approach to various stakeholders.

Download the full MarTech Intelligence Report: Enterprise Customer Journey Orchestration Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide

The post How to decide if you’re ready for a customer journey orchestration solution appeared first on MarTech.

Basic CJO categories

Customer journey orchestration isn’t as precisely defined as other marketing technology categories. It’s a fairly new niche, and vendors are coming at it from different angles. 

Some players have newly architected solutions specifically targeted at meeting this particular need. Others are building upon expertise in other channels, such as call analytics or customer intelligence, by evolving through development or acquisitions. 

A third category, which includes Salesforce and Adobe, are enterprise application providers with established customer bases that have been adding customer journey analytics and orchestration functionality to their offerings. 

Industry-watchers expect to see additional entries from pure-play start-ups, as well as the repositioning of vendors in adjacent categories such as customer data platforms, marketing analytics and real-time interaction management (RTIM). 

What defines customer journey orchestration? 

The phrase “customer journey” has been a part of the digital marketing dialogue for years, which may contribute to the lack of clarity around what exactly customer journey orchestration is, and what it isn’t. The following core areas have emerged as critical to getting an actionable picture of the customer journey and taking action to improve it. 

Customer-focused, outside-in approach 

Marketers may have an “ideal customer journey” in mind, but a true customer journey analytics approach acknowledges that today’s customers expect a great deal of flexibility to tailor interactions with businesses to their own preferences. 

With multiple devices, a variety of channels and many different paths to purchase, customers are in charge of their individual buying journeys. Everyone’s journey may be slightly different. Therefore it’s important that marketers look at things from the customer’s point of view, rather than sticking to a potentially outdated preconception of how people come to make a purchase. 

A focus on the lifetime value of the customer 

Instead of focusing solely on the awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation and purchase stages — aka the “classic marketing funnel” of the buyer experience — customer journey orchestration aims to nurture the relationship between the customer and the brand beyond ownership and into repeat purchases and brand advocacy. 

Cross-channel data

To achieve this big picture view of the customer journey, marketers must be able to bring in data across every customer touchpoint, whether it’s led by marketing or not. This includes data from call centers, chatbots, in-store interactions and more. 

Real-time or close to real-time data

The simplest goal of customer journey orchestration practitioners is to identify and eliminate roadblocks hindering customers. But the ultimate goal is much more ambitious – to deliver contextually-relevant experiences to customers at their preferred touchpoints. To do this, they need to be able to gather data in real-time and respond in real time. 

Artificial intelligence and machine learning 

Developing insights, determining what the next best action should be for a particular customer, and setting that experience in motion are unlikely to occur in real-time without the benefit of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Making use of those technologies is key to customer journey orchestration.

Download the full MarTech Intelligence Report: Enterprise Customer Journey Orchestration Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide

The post What is customer journey orchestration and how does it work? appeared first on MarTech.

Given all of that promise, marketers are certainly evaluating these technologies and one crucial part of that process is the demo. It’s important to set up demos within a relatively short time frame of each other to help make relevant
comparisons.

Make sure that all potential internal users are on the demo call, and pay attention to the following:

• How easy is the platform to use?
• Does the vendor seem to un that uderstand our business and our marketing needs?
• Are they showing us our “must-have” features?

Explore capabilities from vendors like Adobe, Pointillist, SharpSpring, Salesforce and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on customer journey orchestration platforms.

Click here to download!

Here are 19 questions you can use during the demo to thoroughly evaluate whether what you are seeing is right for your organization:

Data gathering:

• Does the tool integrate with the systems you currently use to store customer data?
• What type of machine learning and/or artificial intelligence does the tool use?
• Can we segment and view customers by multiple criteria?
• Can the tool identify anonymous interactions and match them to the correct profile?
• Does the tool allow us to reconcile data from all of the channels in which we interact with customers?
• Are you GDPR and CCPA compliant?

Reporting:

• Do you provide real-time analytics?
• What do the reports look like and how can they be customized?
• Does the tool use artificial intelligence and machine learning? How?
• Is sentiment analysis of relevant customer interactions available?
• What types of insights are surfaced through analysis and what recommendations does the tool make proactively?

Orchestration:

• Does the tool natively orchestrate interactions or integrate with the systems we use (i.e. display ad management, content management systems)?
• How is data exchanged? Are real-time or near real-time personalized or segmented campaigns feasible?

Training and customer support:

• How much training will we need to use the software, and what kind of training is available?
• What level of customer support do you offer, and when is it available (i.e., 24/7 vs. 8/5)?
• What is the turnaround time for support queries/tickets?
• Do you provide professional services or support for our transition?
• What new features are you considering?
• What’s the long-term product roadmap and launch dates?

The post 19 questions to ask customer journey orchestration vendors during the demo appeared first on MarTech.