Users interact with companies and organizations through many channels, including the web, mobile applications, email, online chat, in person and over the phone. Interacting with an organization through a specific channel is often just one part of a larger customer journey in service of a goal. And individual customer journeys add up to create customers’ overall relationship with a company.
For this reason, UX practitioners should focus not only on designing specific channel interactions but also on how all possible touchpoints work together and on the quality of all these longitudinal interactions.
Our user research on omnichannel customer journeys identified 5 key attributes of a high-quality experience:
This article discusses why orchestration is important in the omnichannel experience.
What Is Customer-Journey Orchestration?
Of course, we want to support moving from one interaction to the next in a customer journey by designing seamless ways for customers to pick up where they left off. Beyond this ease of transitioning, however, the design should be one step ahead of users — predicting what they’ll do next and meeting their specific, individual needs before they even formulate them.
Orchestrating the customer journey is the surreptitious planning or coordination of the journey to minimize user effort for future actions. In other words, intelligently offering something useful and relevant (a piece of content or an interaction) to your customer as a next step because you understand that customer and your user base well enough to predict a potential need or action based on the current situation.
Three Levels of Orchestration
Contextual and real-time orchestration requires a highly integrated, mature data model, along with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, but this should not keep aspiring organizations from achieving some level of orchestration in their customer experience. There are less complex ways to begin designing orchestrated experiences. We describe three levels of orchestration.
Level One: Orchestration Tailored for the General User Journey
Organizations that are not poised to invest in the technical undertaking required to carry out data-driven orchestration can begin by simply automating journeys. Identify common customer journeys that follow a relatively linear path and look for opportunities to remove the effort required to take the next step in the journey.
A moving service called Bellhops effectively orchestrated a predictable and linear customer journey. The movers used a dedicated mobile app to check in and out of their moving jobs. These actions generated notifications and interactions for customers. The arrival notification prepared the customer to answer the door. The customer already knew whom to expect because the company had preemptively sent an email with photos of the movers, along with their names. On completion, the movers checked out and the customer instantly received a text message with a link to review the job. This prompt was still in the moment: the customer’s attention was focused on the move, so it was natural to click the link and review the job while it was still relevant and fresh. The invitation to review would have felt like a chore, had it been delivered even hours later, when the customer was focused on unpacking boxes.
The Bellhops moving company sent contextually appropriate text messages to help customers transition to the next steps in the journey.
Though this customer journey was not personalized, it was still very orchestrated. The company automatically transitioned the user to the next step of the journey at the right moment in the relevant context. It was not up to the customer to seek out the next step. The text-message delivery made sense because the customer was not sitting at the computer checking email in these moments — she was packing and unpacking. The entire journey was so connected, effortless, and well-designed that the customer walked away impressed by the experience.
This type of orchestration could easily work with other linear customer journeys such as going to a movie or to a doctor appointment. To implement it, organizations should identify which channels users will most often have access to at each touchpoint, then optimize the transition between channels, as well as the next interaction for that device or channel. This optimization often involves the special capabilities of each channel. For example, a patient preparing for a doctor appointment might receive a text notification from the clinic’s patient portal notifying the patient that it’s almost time to leave for the appointment. Perhaps the message could include a link to the address for driving directions. When the patient arrives, the patient-portal app might use geofencing technology to allow her to check in as she enters the building, then instruct her to take a seat in the waiting room.
These types of linear journeys don’t require customer data to orchestrate. All that is required is thoughtful service design.
Level Two: Orchestration Tailored to Large Segments of Users
The second level of orchestration involves using specific pieces of data to facilitate the next interactions in a customer journey. Organizations that have a clear understanding of a typical customer journey should look for places where they can inject specific personalized interactions based on customer data. A customer-journey map can help identify these opportunities.
The journey map below shows the steps that the persona Emotional Eric goes through in the process of shopping for a new car using a website and mobile app designed to help people search for cars of interest in their area.
Emotional Eric goes through the process of selecting, comparing, and test-driving vehicles he finds on the website before he makes a purchase decision.
By understanding common behaviors and customer needs throughout this journey, the company could orchestrate the car-buying experience in a variety of ways.
- Send a comparison-help email. The company could use Eric’s history to determine the types of cars he is interested in, then send him an automated email with 2–3 pieces of quality web-content about each vehicle type he is interested in. Because this company knows that their customers often spend time on other sites researching and comparing candidate cars, this personalized and highly contextual interaction would add value to his experience with the organization.
- Generate a test-drive map. Again, knowing that he is interested in a handful of specific vehicles, the website could generate a mobile-friendly map with all the dealerships selling cars of interest to Eric to help him plan his test-drive visits.
- Send a dealership geofence notification. If Eric has shown interest in a car, the mobile application could use geofencing to notify him when he nears a dealership with a car of interest. He may want to drive through the lot to take a quick look.
- Enable dealers to bring the car to him. The website could also notify relevant dealers that Eric is interested in a specific vehicle and offer him to bring the car of interest to his location for a test drive.
With segmented orchestration, experience designers identify targeted opportunities in which they can add specific orchestrated interactions to the customer journey for groups of users that meet certain requirements. The company may already have the data to determine when these additions would be appropriate or it may need to start collecting this type of data. Some of these personalized interactions may be kicked off by backend batch processes that identify those who qualify and generate the next step for them. The drawback to large-segment orchestration is that these interactions may not always be delivered in the right moment of the customer journey. However it is implemented, the orchestrated touchpoint is identified and built in a manual and static fashion, which is the main difference between level 2 and the next level — dynamically automated real-time orchestration tailored to granular user segments.
Level Three: Orchestration Tailored to Granular User Segments Powered by Specialized Tools
The most mature and complex level of omnichannel journey orchestration is powered by a journey-orchestration engine that uses customer-data to determine what, when, and how to deliver an interaction to a customer.
This is done through software that supports journey analytics and enables organizations to orchestrate journeys by taking action to adjust touchpoints for segments of customers based on any type of insights known about a customer. The most sophisticated tools use AI to suggest actions. The goal is to deliver personalized customer journeys based on users’ context, interests, goals, and behaviors. These tools help businesses create a web of action-related touchpoints, where each customer may experience a unique pathway toward his goals, as the software predicts future interactions and executes the delivery of the most relevant communications and interactions.
I took an Uber home from a birthday party a while back. When I got home, I got two emails from Uber. One was my receipt, but several minutes later I also received an email from Uber Eats (a meal-delivery app owned by Uber) with the subject Midnight Munchies? Now, I don’t know exactly how and why Uber generated this email, but it very well could have been through a journey-orchestration tool. Let’s see how this tool would work.
What Uber knew about me
- I had gone home from an entertainment district in my city.
- It was around midnight, 12:16 AM to be exact.
- I was not an Uber Eats user.
What Uber knew about people like me
- People who leave an entertainment district late at night often order food for delivery when they return home.
Based on this customer insight and the identification of my behavior and context, Uber sent me a message at the exact moment in time when it might be relevant. Yes, it was a cross-sell. Yes, I suppose some could consider it creepy. However, it was also a highly relevant and thoughtful suggestion meant to improve my customer experience with Uber as a brand.
(If you attempt ideas like this, do monitor your analytics to check the conversion rate for the new speculative-nudge touchpoint. If very few customers accept your suggestion, it wasn’t helpful and should be discontinued.)
There are many types of software platforms on the market that have some or all the capabilities required to enable dynamically automated real-time orchestration. Those capabilities are as follows:
- Customer-data storage and management refers to the organization’s ability to understand individual customers’ journeys across its entire ecosystem of channels and interactions, from sales to support. Platforms that specialize in this capability are called customer-data platforms (CDPs); they create a single view (SVP) or a 360-degree view of the customer — essentially a data view of an individual’s interactions with the organization that would typically live across many various backend systems such as customer-record management systems and support-center systems.
- Journey analytics and/or visioning enable companies to analyze customer behavior and motivations as they unfold over time and across various channels and devices. Customer-journey analytics platforms, also known as customer-journey visioning platforms, listen to activity across all touchpoints and channels, then create visualizations of the customer-journey data to help businesses understand customer journeys through their ecosystem. These visualizations allow organizations to form a customer-journey strategy.
- Journey orchestration software enables organizations to manage and automate journeys by identifying events or user states and allowing organizations to build actions to occur based on those events. The most sophisticated tools will use AI to suggest actions. The goal is to deliver personalized customer journeys based on users’ interests, goals, and behaviors. These tools help businesses create a web of action-related touchpoints, where each customer may experience a unique pathway toward his goals, as the software predicts future interactions and executes the most relevant communications.
Orchestrated: 4 of 5 Recommended Omnichannel Components
The best and most enjoyable experiences are highly personalized and dynamically unfold based on the unique needs of the individual. As companies and organizations design for the larger user experience, they should strive to deliver orchestrated journeys.
In addition to being orchestrated, omnichannel channel experiences must be consistent, optimized for context, seamless, and collaborative.
Our full-day course on Omnichannel Journeys and Customer Experience covers all these recommended components.
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