In our recent blog post, “Mastering Conversation Orchestration for Enhanced Customer Experience,” we explored the fundamentals of orchestrating conversations to create seamless customer experiences.

Now, let’s dive deeper into the essential counterpart of this strategy: journey orchestration. To ensure conversations are orchestrated effectively, contact centres must first ensure their customer journeys are orchestrated seamlessly. And that’s where customer journey orchestration comes into play.

What is journey orchestration?

As customers increasingly use diverse channels to interact with organisations, from traditional phone and email to social media, the risk of siloed workflows and lost customer insights grows. This can damage the customer experience. In fact, 62% of consumers state that a brand would lose their loyalty if it delivered a non-personalised experience.

At its core, journey orchestration enables organisations to:

• Break down silos and reduce the risk of losing customer knowledge
• Deliver personalised experiences by tailoring interactions based on customer preferences and behaviours
• Ensure a consistent experience across all channels and improve the overall customer experience
• Proactive dialogue with customers in all phases of the customer journey based on available customer data

So, how can your organisation implement journey orchestration?

Get started with journey orchestration

There are several ways in which organisations can start with journey orchestration. Here’s one way of doing it:  

• Define your customer personas and segments: Understand who your customers are, what they want, and how they behave across different channels. This will help you tailor your interactions and journeys to their needs and expectations. 
• Map your customer journeys: Identify the key touchpoints and interactions that your customers have with your organisation, from the first contact to the post-purchase stage. This will help you visualise the current state of your customer experience and identify any gaps or friction points.
• Design your ideal customer journeys: Based on your customer personas, segments, and journey maps, create your desired customer journeys that align with your business goals and customer expectations. This will help you define the actions and outcomes that you want to achieve at each touchpoint and interaction. 
• Implement your journey orchestration solution: Choose a cloud-based omnichannel solution that can integrate with your existing systems and platforms and enable you to orchestrate your customer journeys across all channels. This will help you execute your ideal customer journeys and monitor their performance and impact. 
• Measure and optimise your customer journeys: Collect and analyse customer feedback and data across all channels and use them to evaluate the effectiveness of your customer journeys. This will help you identify any issues or opportunities, and make adjustments and improvements as needed. 

This was a quick way of showing how journey orchestration can be done. If you’re interested in learning more, we go more into detail in our free CCaaS buyer’s journey here.

How an omnichannel solution enables optimised customer journeys

At the core, your organisation needs to have the right tools and systems in place to enable optimised customer journeys. For contact centres, the solution lies in adopting a cloud-based omnichannel system. 

Imagine a scenario where a customer starts their journey on your website, browsing through products or services. With a cloud-based omnichannel solution seamlessly integrated into your ecosystem, their interaction becomes part of a cohesive journey of engagement. As they navigate from the website to social media, perhaps seeking more information, the omnichannel solution ensures a consistent, cohesive experience at every touchpoint.

With 33% of contact centres anticipating challenges with outdated systems in the coming year, adapting a cloud-based omnichannel solution becomes imperative for future success. Here’s why: 

• A better understanding of the customer: A cloud-based omnichannel solution, like Puzzel, integrates data from various sources, providing a unified view of the customer across different channels and touchpoints. This comprehensive view enables your organisation to gain insights into customer behaviours, preferences, and journeys, facilitating more effective orchestration.
• Increased scalability and flexibility: Cloud-based omnichannel solutions offer scalability and flexibility, allowing your organisation to adapt to changing customer demands and business needs. Whether it’s scaling operations during peak periods or introducing new channels and capabilities, a cloud-based solution provides the agility required to orchestrate complex customer journeys effectively.
• Consistency across channels: Consistency is key to delivering a seamless customer experience. A cloud-based omnichannel solution enables your contact centre to maintain consistency across channels, ensuring that interactions are aligned with the brand’s voice, messaging, and standards, regardless of the channel or device used by the customer.

The difference between conversation orchestration and journey orchestration

Now, these terms might be confusing, and it can be difficult to separate them. Journey orchestration is about designing and optimising the end-to-end customer journey across all channels and touchpoints, from the initial awareness stage to the post-purchase stage. Conversation orchestration involves creating personalised interactions that customers have through various communication channels, such as voice, chat, email, social media, etc. For example, journey orchestration can identify the best moments to engage, deliver consistent experiences, and measure and improve satisfaction and loyalty. Conversation orchestration, meanwhile, ensures customers are routed to the best agent, provides proactive support, and follows up. 

By leveraging a cloud-based omnichannel solution, your contact centre can effectively orchestrate customer journeys, delivering seamless, personalised experiences that drive satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately, business success. Journey orchestration, in combination with conversation orchestration, enables your organisation to take your customer experience to the next level, resulting in increased customer retention and loyalty, reduced operational costs and increased efficiency, and enhanced customer feedback and insights. 

In our next blog, we’ll explain how digital engagement can help your organisation take conversation orchestration a step further. 

Are you ready to orchestrate your customer journeys?

At Puzzel, we are ready to be your partner in achieving excellent customer journeys in 2024 and beyond. Learn more about the topic here or book a free demo to understand how.