The customer journey is expansive. It involves every touchpoint (or interaction) a customer has with an organization, its products, and services.
Touchpoints may include when customers see advertisements, walk past a brick-and-mortar store, browse a website, make a purchase, or receive customer service. Every touchpoint can inform the customer-brand relationship, which allows businesses to develop an in-depth customer engagement strategy.
As your business develops an engagement strategy, a customer journey map is a helpful way to plot touchpoints and understand customers’ expectations. Customer journey orchestration enhances those efforts to help the business create a customer engagement strategy that will improve customer experiences.
This blog details how to develop a customer engagement strategy and the intelligent customer journey technology that enhances these strategies. We also define how customer journey orchestration and customer journey maps improve the customer experience.
What is a Customer Engagement Strategy?
Business success relies on strategies that map how companies will achieve their objectives. Customer engagement can be a north star for business and department leaders as they create their strategy.
Customer engagement involves the interactions between a business and its customers. These interactions can happen across channels and span from the first contact through a purchase and beyond. Companies create customer engagement strategies to strengthen these touchpoints and improve customer experiences.
More specifically, a customer engagement strategy is a plan that defines the types of experiences that will optimize customer satisfaction. Examples of a customer engagement strategy include:
- Customer loyalty programs
- Communication and connections across multiple channels
- Personalized messages and interactions
- Utilizing customer journey technology that enables and enhances interactions
An effective customer engagement strategy relies on customer journey orchestration, which we’ll dive deeper into next.
The Central Role of Customer Journey Orchestration
Customer journey orchestration is a real-time and personalized approach to interacting with customers. This approach leverages real-time customer data from multiple touchpoints to determine how best to interact with a customer. Businesses can leverage data from past and present interactions to engage with each customer in a personalized way and build relationships. In this way, customer journey orchestration improves customer experience outcomes by providing customers with interactions that meet their individual needs.
Business leaders may already be familiar with a similar term: customer journey management. While the name seems the same, customer journey management is less individualized. It takes a comprehensive look at segmented customer behaviors to gauge insights. Customer journey management groups customers according to specific characteristics, such as demographics or behavior metrics. This approach does not include all the touch points that customer journey orchestration does.
Customer journey orchestration goes further. It is more customer-centric and maps strategy based on an individual customer’s behavior. Customer journey orchestration’s role in a customer engagement strategy is to anticipate and improve personal journeys with a company. This includes the journey to the purchase decision and interactions after.
What is a Customer Journey Map?
No journey is complete without the proper directions, especially customer journeys. A customer journey map outlines the steps customers take through their journey or experience with a brand.
From the first interaction with a business to tracking an order, journey maps provide information on how a customer cultivates a relationship with a brand. The following are the typical steps in a customer journey, visualized in a customer journey map.
As the image illustrates, journey maps visually depict a customer’s touchpoints across the organization. This visual depiction of customer touchpoints helps businesses improve customer journey orchestration. Decision makers can see touchpoints they might have overlooked, such as reviews, social media or surveys, and gather relevant customer data to improve the customer experience.
One significant benefit of customer journey mapping is the opportunity to bring a refreshed customer perspective to strategic planning. For example, businesses can review customer purchase habits to inform decisions companywide, from marketing to product design to customer support.
A customer journey map reinforces the importance of constant customer input, reminding employees that they create experiences for the customer. Employees can shift perspective from profit-focused to customer-focused.
Another benefit is increased customer retention. When customers are happy, they don’t leave. Companies that make the customer experience a more efficient interaction increase customer satisfaction and lower churn.
Knowledge of the steps on a customer journey map and investment in tools to enhance those steps improve customer journey orchestration and customer experience.
Types of Customer Journey Technology
Customer journey technology refers to the tools and software that help organizations enhance and improve the customer journey. Below are two beneficial customer journey tools business leaders can utilize to enhance the overall customer experience.
Customer Insight Programs
Customer insight programs can provide unbiased and objective data based on a customer’s movements. Insight can include purchase habits, time spent on a brand’s website, demographic information, and advertising and social media analytics.
Customer insight programs provide real-time insights to help inform customer journey orchestration. Business leaders can visualize the entire journey and identify areas of improvement across interactions. These insights can also help improve customer care processes such as automation, collections, and sales.
AI-enabled Virtual Agents
AI technology, such as IVAs, can streamline and personalize the customer experience. Mosaicx provides business leaders with AI-enabled IVAs that help customers interact with a brand with ease. IVAs use natural language understanding (NLU) or natural language processing (NLP) to generate personalized responses to users.
IVAs can interact with customers through multiple customer journey touchpoints. For example, IVAs can answer customer questions about products or services, help customers make purchases, and check order statuses.
IVAs can also offer surveys after a customer makes a purchase or signs up for a loyalty program. A customer satisfaction survey provides decision-makers with honest and individual information about the customer experience. With this information, companies can improve their customer engagement strategies.
Customer journey orchestration creates customer-centric organizations through real-time, personalized customer experiences. Business leaders who want to uplevel customer relationships with real-time insights can consider implementing customer journey technology.
Through customer journey orchestration, business leaders prioritize the customer experience and, as a result, increase brand loyalty and satisfaction.