Intelligent Journey Orchestration in a Nutshell: From Four Disciplines to One Best Practice

Customer-centric business objectives blend marketing and CX

Marketing and CX have traditionally been separated into comfortable silos, with marketing focused on the bottom line — driving ROI — and CX teams working on the softer side of things, solving questions like “How is our brand being experienced by prospects and customers?” and “How can that experience be improved?”

With the increasing business focus on providing an omnichannel experience and taking a customer-first approach, however, we’re beginning to see CX and marketing come together. Already, at least two-thirds of CMOs are accountable for their organization’s customer experience — a number that can only be expected to increase. 

Businesses are beginning to understand how vital it is to build meaningful relationships before, during, and after every transaction. In fact, 84% of organizations working to improve CX report an increase in revenue.

So how exactly are the new Marketing/CX wünderteams of today improving their customer experience and increasing revenue? Well, as these teams have been fusing, so too has the technology that helps them.

Corroding silos pave the way for martech evolution

Data management and a single view of the customer

Marketing is no longer a funnel — it’s a multi-channel, multi-touchpoint journey. With 79% of consumers wanting brands to demonstrate they care before even considering a purchase, finding the right way to engage with customers before they’re even your customers is of the utmost importance. It’s also a challenge — particularly when most or even all of that interaction happens digitally. 

Companies only have so much control over how customers first come into contact with their brand, and shaping their journey from that point can seem complex. Brands with effective omnichannel engagement programs, however, keep 89% of customers, making transforming the customer journey a worthy challenge for any ambitious business.

For years now, marketers have been tackling this challenge by leveraging data management and marketing channel activation platforms to better reach and convert customers across digital channels. The goal of platforms like these (e.g. DMP, CDP), however, is predominantly focused on increasing ROI, leaving a gap where customer-centricity needs to be addressed. 

That’s starting to change, however, and by 2020, more than 40% of all data analytics projects will relate to an aspect of customer experience.

Technology for mapping the customer journey

CX teams have long been focused on improving the customer journey, and in recent years they have turned to journey mapping technology to help them effectively respond to customer needs across a huge range of digital channels. 

Journey mapping tools enable CX teams to visualize the customer journey — from the first touchpoint to the sale and beyond. This technology can also provide businesses with vital information about key touchpoints, which in turn helps them optimize their customer experience. 

Journey mapping tools alone, however, aren’t enough to equip companies with everything they need to create — and automate — the ultimate customer experience: one-to-one customer journeys across all channels, in real time. 

Intelligent Journey Orchestration: The customer-centric martech strategy

Intelligent Journey Orchestration brings CX and marketing together and combines essential data unification technology (DMP, CDP) with journey mapping technology. Optimized by AI, Intelligent Journey Orchestration platforms go beyond simple journey mapping to offer a new path to a truly data-driven, customer-centric approach that allows businesses to adjust to individual customer needs in real time, across channels. 

How does Intelligent Journey Orchestration work?

At its core, Intelligent Journey Orchestration helps marketers and CX professionals unify, predict and engage. What does that mean? 

• It unifies customer data from all channels and sources, organizing it into flexible, resilient customer profiles. 
• Based on the real-time data in these customer profiles, AI helps predict which step the customer will take next, so your business can be there waiting with the perfect message. 
• Then it engages with customers by personalizing offers and communication and adjusting to their actual needs in the moment. 

In a nutshell, Intelligent Journey Orchestration combines essential marketing and CX technologies to offer a single strategy for creating perfectly personalized customer journeys in real time.

It is the next big step in the evolution of marketing automation and customer journey building because, in addition to enabling people to make smarter decisions, the technology itself is able to make smarter decisions, through the power of AI. This is a major improvement in three key ways:

1. Scalability — more decisions

Intelligent Journey Orchestration technology enables smarter decision making while reducing the number of people needed to make more decisions. Because it's supported by AI, it's is built to learn. This means IJO platforms can help make millions of smart decisions in real time, allowing businesses to easily scale the impact and results of journey orchestration. 

2. Power — even smarter decisions

AI is able to process a lot more (and more complex) data, and it does this work much faster than people. That means that when used correctly, AI is able to make even smarter decisions than us humans.

3. Speed — faster decisions

AI can process a lot of data very quickly, making it an extremely efficient decision-maker. Tasking people with making decisions about customer journeys means asking them to first structure the data, then visualize it, extract information from it, think about next steps and finally apply it. There is no room in this scenario for real-time decision making, meaning that without Intelligent Journey Orchestration, the customer journey remains stuck in a predefined funnel. 

Adding AI to the mix means making decisions in mere microseconds; as a result, customer journeys can be adjusted based on the decisions customers are making in the moment. 

Intelligent Journey Orchestration is the future 

As our customers and the technology they use to go through their journeys advances, so too must the technology and strategies that we use to help them. Intelligent Journey Orchestration combines the best of CX and marketing to offer businesses a new way forward to truly mutually beneficial relationships.