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Customer journey orchestration across ecosystem partners isn't easy. You own the customer relationship, so you also own the customer experience being delivered 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.
What are customer journeys?
A customer journey is the series of tasks, conversations and actions that a customer goes through with an organization to buy, onboard or gain support for a product or service they've bought. It is important to note that a single touchpoint is not a journey; it's one step in a journey. series Touchpoints threaded together create the overall experience. The quality of a customer's journey from end-to-end defines their satisfaction. If there are parts of a journey that are fragmented, confusing, disconnected and confusing, it may lead to lost revenue and relationships.
What is customer journey orchestration?
Journey orchestration is designing and then guiding customers through specific steps to onboard, use or get help with. aproduct or service. It is the building of that process and then managing it to ensure customers are progressing through each milestone as quickly and easily as possible. Typically customer journeys consist of a number of steps, often done by separate employees and teams. They usually have their own view into the customer and their own software that is highly efficient for their particular function, but doesn't connect to those who are fulfilling other parts of the journey. Data silos are common in customer journeys, particularly in complicated industries.
Journey Orchestration in ecosystems is tricky
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 journey orchestration tools to create ideal customer interactions, at scale, across their lifecycle to reap the benefits Ernst and Young describe.
Journey orchestration software: Four things you need
When considering a customer orchestration solution, organizations should look for five essential characteristics that address the intricacies of their ecosystem delivery model without adding technical debt that slows down innovation or agility.
1. A view of all interactions across your 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.
2. Real-time data on customer CX activity
See a customer's journey status at any minute and solve for friction or obstacles proactively, before he/she becomes frustrated and leaves. Real-time CX data is important for mitigating risk - seeing red flags before customers leave or complain in frustration. Conversely, it can be used to expand personalized offerings based on their activity across the organization. By surfacing instant information to employees and to customers themselves, you make it easy to quickly determine journey progress, what's next and how to help them 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.
3. Customer journey automation, using AI
Uses AI to surgically evaluate CX and operational efficiency once you have ecosystem data is flowing into a centralized orchestration layer. The best orchestration engines specialize in CX but use AI to bolster insights faster than a human can.
"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.
4. No-code journey orchestrator
Look for a solution anyone in the organization can use without IT training or resources. Drag and drop ease can speed up the building of customer journeys while providing precise control over the sequence of steps, tasks and automations. Unique journeys can be built quickly and then cloned for further curation, making personalization at scale efficient. Business lines must have an orchestrator that gives them the speed to respond to market opportunities, competitive challenges and evolving customer needs. Drag-and-drop journey builders provide that capability, launching new journeys in minutes not months.
No-code journey building also saves companies from mounting technical debt that comes with custom hard-coded add-ons to legcy systems. They may solve today's need but they handcuff organizations becuase they can't anticipate the next use case or customer expectation. (Think of how fast AI tools exploded and became table stakes!) 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
Journeys, our journey orchestration platform
Our newest version of Journeys is a powerful AI-infused customer journey orchestration platform that lets you design and manage customer experiences in real time, incorporating steps and tasks that take place outside of your walls with partners. In a single view in which everyone can view and collaborate. Customer journeys can be built and published in as little as 15 minutes.
Our CXMEngine platform plugs into your existing legacy systems using APIs, from CRM and ticketing systems to phone systems, project management platforms, core banking platforms and more. We bring together existing systems and unlock the customer interaction data within them. Then we act as a unification layer, allowing teams to see all of the information and knowledge they need in one place without toggling between different systems. Disparate departments and organizations can finally work together as a single team with a shared view to deliver a seamless customer journey.
Learn more about how our ecosystem connectors thread together data from different teams, systems and organizations into one screen to allow for better customer journey orchestration and automation.
See Journeys in action. Unsure where to start or how to best tweak your existing customer journeys for better business outcomes? Schedule a journey mapping session with one of our experts.
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