Customer Journey Orchestration: Key Functions & How to Get Started

If you’re thinking about customer journey management, you’re many steps ahead of most contact centers.

By putting the customer experience first, you’ll be in the higher echelons of contact centers. You’ll become truly customer-centric, and your customers will love you for it.

Before we dive into the possibilities for automation and efficiencies, it’s important to take a step back and understand exactly what customer journey orchestration (CJO) means and involves.

What Is Customer Journey Orchestration?

Customer journey orchestration is the process of understanding how customers behave at different stages in their interaction with you and creating a positive experience by design.

By mapping the route each type of customer will take when they contact you, you can optimize their journey for speed, quality of answer, and experience.

We can break customer journey orchestration down into three key areas:

1. Coordinating customer experiences

CJO ensures a cohesive, consistent experience across all channels (calls, website, email, and social media) throughout the customer journey.

No matter how a customer tries to reach you, there is a clear path for them to move through. This might be driven by their input, like a key press on your IVR, or dictated by you.

For example, you could present regular FAQs before your auto attendant options or offer callbacks when queue time is high.

You can do the same for other channels, too. Take web chat, for example. When a customer initiates a new chat and your contact center recognizes their details, you can auto-populate who they are so they pass the identification and verification process quickly.

From here, you could propose filter questions to see whether they need human agent help or whether a bot can look after their queries, removing the need to hold in line.

2. Data-driven personalization

The worst thing about contacting a business for customers is when they have to answer the most generic questions. When there’s an urgent query, you don’t want to present options for sales, support, and other high-level information.

Instead, when your customer journey is mapped well, your contact center solution recognizes the inbound number, knows who’s calling, and presents agents with information about their last purchase, support ticket, or query.

Even before a customer reaches an agent, you could choose to run a database cross-reference and make an educated guess that they’re calling to pay their outstanding invoice. Instead of pressing five options, waiting for an agent, then making a payment, ask them this upfront and allow them to pay without agent help.

3. Omnichannel approach

One of the biggest wins for improving customer engagement is providing a unified customer experience.

When customers call you and reference a previous email, web chat, or social media message, the expectation is that the person they’re talking to has access to it. This is no longer a desirable. It’s table stakes.

By implementing an omnichannel contact center, you ensure agents have access to all information, documents, and history regardless of the channel they originated from.

Benefits of Orchestrating Customer Journeys

While the benefits of orchestrating customer journeys impact how customers reach and perceive you, they extend to sales and retention too.

Happy customers who enjoy (or at least tolerate) contacting you are more likely to renew their contracts and increase their customer lifetime value. Below are some of the main benefits of CJO.

Increased customer loyalty

• Positive customer experiences lead to repeat business.
• Smooth-flowing processes help skyrocket metrics like net promoter score (NPS) and customer satisfaction score (CSAT).

Improved sales and conversions

• Personalized customer interactions nudge new customers toward buying decisions.
• Efficient processes mean customers get down sales funnels quicker.

Reduced customer churn

• Proactive support anticipates individual customer needs and reduces frustration.
• Consistently pleasant interactions reduce the need or temptation to seek an alternative provider.

Capabilities of Customer Journey Orchestration

When thinking about CJO as a technology stack, the data at your disposal and the workflows you can build make the possibilities vast.

If you’re only just getting started, it can be too much to consume. Begin with these four key aspects when planning for the first time.

Customer data integration

You can combine data from various sources to understand customers better. The more information an agent (or you as a business) has, the better you can serve them.

Pull from sources like:

• Customer relationship management (CRM) systems
• Standalone customer experience platforms
• Marketing automation platforms
• Billing and accounts systems
• Sales management systems
• Customer data platforms
• E-commerce solutions

For instance, if you know a caller abandoned their shopping cart on your website five minutes ago, there’s a high chance they are calling about that product.

The more data points you have, the more personalized and efficient your customer’s experience.

Journey mapping

The purpose of customer journey mapping is to visualize customer touchpoints and identify improvement opportunities.

By walking through interactions on different channels, you can get a feel of how easy or hard it is to contact your business. Armed with this information, you can make tweaks to the flow of your contact channels.

If, for example, getting through to your support team takes too long because of complex options on your IVR, revisit these. Putting the most frequently pressed options at the beginning can trim significant time off your customer’s wait time.

Over time, you can use specialist software and customer journey analytics to sense-check that what you perceive to be the best customer journey is the right one.

Checking for negative sentiment, irregular wait times, or spikes in average handle time (AHT) or first call resolution (FCR) are obvious signs that something has become disjointed.

Real-time personalization

When a customer does one thing, predict the next. That’s the level of personalization you could be applying using the data you have to hand.

Further boosted by the introduction of artificial intelligence and machine learning, you can even begin to diffuse situations before they arise.

If a customer has called you about a support ticket and reaches out on web chat moments later, it’s probably because their ticket wasn’t resolved to their satisfaction. Rather than queuing again to speak to another agent (who they’ve now lost their faith in), they’ve opted for a less personal, more efficient channel.

Recognizing this, the system flags that this is a repeat customer with a high chance of a complaint. Instead of asking for their reason for opening a live chat, automatically connect them to a senior agent and ask if the reason for contact is their latest ticket.

Automation

When it comes to customer experience automation, we’re talking about automating repetitive tasks for improved efficiency. This applies to both the customer side and the agent side.

If customers have fewer hoops to jump through, they have a better experience. By removing redundant IVR options and recognizing caller IDs and voice inputs, you automate the greeting and verification processes. Customers get where they need to be quicker.

When agents have more free time, they can dedicate real time to customers, instead of rushing through each call trying to hit their KPIs. Introducing things like automatic call notes, timestamps, and sentiment analysis in call recordings saves time when it comes to wrap-up, quality assurance, and administration.

Getting Started With Customer Journey Orchestration

Customer journey orchestration is an ongoing process. While your best intentions may be to create an evergreen customer journey map, remember that people, processes, and technology change over time.

But don’t get disheartened. Making a start puts you ahead of your competitors who skip this.

Here are the three most crucial steps to kick off your process.

Identify customer touchpoints

The first part of customer journey orchestration is pinpointing all the offline and digital channels where customers interact with your brand.

Think about all the places someone reaches out to get help, buy something, raise a complaint, talk about you behind your back, etc.

These could be:

• Calling your main number
• Calling dedicated department numbers
• Calling agent DIDs
• Filling out a form on your website
• Starting a live chat on your website
• Sending you an email
• Responding to an SMS campaign
• Posting on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok
• Messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Snapchat

Wherever a customer might contact you, note these down as potential customer touchpoints. These play a huge part in mapping your customer journey.

Inside each of these journey starting points, there may be extra stops along the customer lifecycle. Things like call queues, IVR presses, and agent transfers are all touchpoints that add or remove potential stress or delight in the customer journey.

Map the customer journey

Start by putting yourself in your customers’ shoes. And not your ideal customer. Pick an annoying one with lots of problems. You could even break them down into customer segments and map the journey per type of customer.

If you already have customer profiles, perhaps created by your digital marketing teams, use these as the basis for the types of customers you’re going to replicate.

💡 Idea: Create dummy accounts in your CRM and contact center platform. This way, your call center agents who answer the call have contacts and data to play with.

Do this in real time:

• Call into your main number
• Choose the appropriate options on your IVR (if you have one)
• Explain the problem to the agent who answers
• Follow their prompts to log a ticket, get support, make a purchase, etc.

At each phase, note down the time taken and any pain points. This is a reflection of what it’s like to be your customer.

Repeat this process across all the communication channels you support. To stress test your customer journey, become a caller who’s already sent an email or received one of your SMS campaigns. The more realistic your scenario, the more genuine your customer experience.

Gather customer data

Collect data to understand customer needs and preferences. This will feed into your plans for more efficient routing and better personalization of conversations.

You can pull historical and real-time data from many sources:

• Customer experience software
• CRMs (like Salesforce, Dynamics, etc.)
• Billing and accounting systems
• Sales management systems

With this data, plan what can be used at each touchpoint. If you can skip a queue, reduce wait time, or free up agents, use this data as an ally.

Where Customer Journey Orchestration Platforms and Contact Centers Intersect

• Many contact center solutions offer integrations with CJO platforms: These allow data sharing and a more unified view of the customer journey.
• Some contact centers have built-in customer journey mapping tools: These can help visualize touchpoints and identify areas for improvement.
• Other features include omnichannel routing and self-service options: These align with CJO principles by ensuring customers can reach support through their preferred channel and potentially resolve issues independently.

Understand Your Customer Behavior Better With Nextiva

Adopting customer journey orchestration helps you deliver the best possible customer experience.

The better the experience, the higher the chance of repeat business, renewed contracts, and customer advocacy.

Getting intimate with your customer journey and putting yourself in your customers’ shoes gives you the best chance of creating the most optimized workflow for customers to follow, no matter how they contact you.

If you handle omnichannel interactions, a contact center platform (like Nextiva) can be beneficial and help consolidate the costs you’re spending on other customer service tools.

You get insights into every stage of your customer journey and powerful analytics to make sure the data you’re using is fit for purpose at the right time.

Features include:

• Trend analysis
• Voice analytics
• Agent utilization
• Sentiment analysis
• Channel breakdown
• Call routing performance
• Monitoring and quality assurance

Nextiva’s AI-powered contact center solution includes everything you need to gain meaningful insights from your contact center and orchestrate an optimum customer journey.