Customer journey orchestration across ecosystem partners isn't easy. You own the customer relationship, so you also own the customer experience being delivered to them even though you can't fully control touch points outside of your organization. So how can you de-risk your customer journeys to ensure they have good interactions from beginning to end and value their relationship with your brand, even when they engage with your partners? How can you comply with regulators that monitoring customer protections if you can't see third party engagements?
According to research from Ernst and Young, 31% of companies use an ecosystem model to provide products and services to customers. Of those that embrace them, ecosystems, on average, contribute nearly 14% of total annual revenues, and approximately 13% in cost reduction and incremental earnings, says the analyst. Companies have expanded their ecosystems since 2020, (likely due to these outcomes) growing from five to seven relationships. Therefore, ecosystem partners are increasingly involved in customer journeys.
High-performing ecosystems drive, on average, 1.5 times the cost reduction, and generate 2.1 times the incremental revenue growth, compared to low-performing ecosystems.
Designing Customer Journeys Across Ecosystems is Tough
Ecosystem partners are increasingly participating in many parts of the customer journey, but your customer didn’t choose the partners - they chose you. You own the relationship, and you own the quality of the customer experience, even if others deliver it.
Customers hold you accountable for their journey - not your partners. And that’s actually good. Your brand loyalty and ultimately, customer retention depend on it. Anything that diminishes your brand promise weakens customer stickiness.
Therefore, you need tools to create ideal customer journeys, at scale, across complex ecosystems, to reap the benefits Ernst and Young describe.
Five Things to Look for in Journey Orchestration Technology
When considering a journey orchestration solution, organizations should look for five essential characteristics that address complicated ecosystem delivery models without adding technical debt that slows down innovation or agility.
Visibility across the entire ecosystem - Journeys don’t stop at department walls - they cross product lines, departments and partners. Your journey orchestration solution has to follow. Look for platforms that have data aggregation connectors to your day-to-day platforms and to your strategic third-party ecosystem partners to create a single shared view.
Real-time visibility - See journey progress up-to-the-minute and solve for friction or obstacles proactively, before a customer becomes frustrated and leaves. Real time CX data is every more important for mitigating risk - seeing red flags before customers leave or complain in frustration. Or conversely, use it to expand opportunities to personalize offerings based on what is happening with a customer right now. By surfacing that information to employees and even directly to customers, you make it easy to quickly determine journey progress, what's next, and how can they best reach their goal.
Why is this important? A study by Forrester and Airtable on fractured organizations noted the top reason for employee disenchantment is difficulty in finding needed information to do their jobs. It noted that 2.4 hours of the day is wasted trying to track down information.
AI-infused tools - Once your ecosystem data is flowing into a centralized orchestration layer, you need a CX solution that uses AI to surgically evaluate CX and operational efficiency. The best solutions specialize in CX but use AI to bolster that expertise in powerful ways.
"Intelligent experience engines must be surgically focused on microgoals—positive moments composing the entire customer experience." - Harvard Business Review
Customer support copilot capabilities, for example, can provide faster, more contextual information to support agents through summarizations of case and customer history so they can understand status very quickly. AI voice and chat have quickly emerged as great complements to human teams by handling routine inquiries after being trained on a company's knowledge base. AI is also powering unprecedented insights, fueled by a high volume of both structured and unstructured data that was once hidden in phone transcripts or chat logs. Now it can uncover opportunities and risks that were very hard to see before. Choosing a company that specializes in CX orchestration, but uses AI to optimize that orchestration is vital.
Drag-and-drop ease - Look for a solution that anyone can use, without IT expertise or resources. Dragging and dropping steps, tasks and automations into place for unique journeys is fast and simple for anyone in the organization to do. With ease, business lines should be able to respond to market opportunities, competitive challenges and evolving customer needs. Drag-and-drop journeys offer the opportunity to build and go live in minutes.
No/low-code implementation - Custom development only adds to the technical debt of your organization and leads to hard-coded solutions that aren’t nimble enough to pivot to changing use cases or customer expectations. Look for platforms that can be implemented within months, not years, and can deliver quick wins and ROI.
Moving from good improvement to great [CX] will require regularly going back to the drawing board and maintaining patience and a mindset of always pushing for more in the interest of customers. -McKinsey
A Quick On-ramp to Build Ideal Customer Experiences
Our newest version of Journeys is a powerful AI-infused drag-and-drop journey builder that lets you design and manage CX in real time, even with partners. Because it's a no-code platform, anyone in your organization can create and publish customer journeys in as little as 15 minutes. Without custom code, development cycles or a strain on IT resources.
Our CXMEngine platform plugs into your existing systems using APIs, from CRM and ticketing systems to phone systems, project management platforms and more. We bring together your legacy systems to unlock the interaction data within them, and unify it so everyone interacting with the customer can work together as a single team with a shared view to collaborate and deliver a seamless experience.
Learn more about how our ecosystem connectors thread together data from different teams, systems and organizations into one screen.
See Journeys in action. Unsure which journey to start with or what exactly requires change in your existing customer journeys to gain better business outcomes? Schedule a journey mapping session with one of our experts.