Insights from the Forrester Wave ™: Customer Journey Orchestration Platforms, Q2 2024

How do you choose the best customer journey orchestration (CJO) platform without spending weeks (or even months) comparing your options?

You rely on a non-biased third party with deep expertise in customer experience research to conduct due diligence for you.

Forrester, a leading industry research and analytics firm, recently evaluated nine CJO platforms based on 30 criteria. The results are in, and we’re pleased to share that CSG was named a Leader by Forrester in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Journey Orchestration Platforms, Q2 2024, a report that evaluates essential capabilities the most significant CJO systems offer. Because of the deep research Forrester conducts, the Wave™ serves as a guide to simplify your evaluation process when looking to partner with a CJO platform provider.

For us, being named a Leader signals that our CJO solutions excel in critical areas like real-time data analysis, predictive behavior modeling and journey decisioning, and that they also align with current industry trends. Forrester evaluates not only current capabilities but also strategic vision, facilitating existing and prospective clients’ confidence in using Wave report for guidance. This forward-looking perspective helps clients invest in a solution that evolves alongside their needs.

We’ve pulled the insights from this blog to provide you with key tips to consider when selecting the right platform. Find out why this report is valuable for organizations looking to improve customer experience (CX) and how journey orchestration is the key to success.

What Is Customer Journey Orchestration?

According to Forrester, journey orchestration refers to “the use of real-time data at the individual customer level to analyze current behavior, predict future behavior, and adjust the journey in the moment for increased customer lifetime value, operational efficiency, and business results.”

There are more than 10,000 marketing technology companies out there competing for a slice of companies’ customer acquisition budgets. But CJO is distinctly different. This Forrester evaluation explores the potential of CJO technologies to enhance post-acquisition customer loyalty and improve overall CX. It’s exciting to see such an important analyst firm highlighting this crucial, often overlooked, capability that big brands with millions of existing customers can tap to increase customer satisfaction, spending limits and loyalty.

But with so many CJO platforms out there, how do you choose the right one?

Your CJO Should Be the Vendor’s Core Strategic Vision, Not an Afterthought

After reviewing The Forrester Wave™: Customer Journey Orchestration Platforms, Q2 2024 evaluation, it’s important to consider what problem your business needs to solve and choose a solution created specifically for that problem.

While some CX vendors offer journey orchestration as an add on, these solutions may struggle to integrate data from various sources and activate insights across the entire customer lifecycle. This is because their focus lies in areas like surveys or contact centers, leading to limited data visibility and a disconnected customer journey. A dedicated CJO platform overcomes these limitations.

By being agnostic to the source of data and the channels used for interaction, a dedicated platform creates a unified view of the customer and allows for flexible journey planning. This ensures a truly individualized experience regardless of where the customer interacts with your brand. Platforms built specifically for orchestration, like CSG’s offering after acquiring Kitewheel, prioritize this functionality. CJO platforms integrate seamlessly into your existing CX ecosystem, maximizing the value of your investments while providing a central hub to orchestrate high-value customer journeys.

Can Your CJO Do That?

When evaluating CJO systems, it’s important to consider what capabilities are missing as well as what functionalities are included. Be wary of vendors that bolt on CJO capabilities to existing technologies, as many of these critical features will only be available if you use the remaining tools in their portfolio.

CJO systems need to:

• Identify areas along the lifecycle where engagement or experience gaps exist and ideate omni-channel strategies that create ideal results. The system should also optimize the orchestration tactics with artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically learn and deliver a better outcome over time.
• Analyze business impact and journey return on investment (ROI). If your CJO system can’t determine which customer journeys have the most impact on key performance indicators and your ROI, it’s difficult to select one or two initial journeys to orchestrate that will achieve quick wins. With CX teams facing mounting pressure to prove ROI quickly, you must be able to show results now—not a year from now.
• Seamlessly integrate historical and real-time data. CJO requires customer data—historical and current. In fact, data is the foundation of journey orchestration. It’s challenging to make sense of the vast amount of data coming from multiple sources and systems, but doing so allows your company to understand CX and act upon that understanding. It should be table stakes for a CJO system to connect customer data from many sources in real time, decipher how customers interact with your company and act based on that information. Data integration is essential for real-time decisioning and orchestration.

Three Tips to Select the Right CJO Platform for Your Business

What’s an organization to do in such a confusing market?

1. Avoid falling for the shiny object and focus on core functionality. Many CJO vendors prioritize flashy features or demos that look impressive. Don’t be lured by bells and whistles. The effectiveness of any single CJO feature depends on its underlying foundation. In a car, it’s the engine—not the leather seats—that determines performance. Similarly, it’s the core of a CJO system, not its superficial features, that determines its impact on CX. A CJO system that excels in journey storytelling but fails to detect and act on real-time customer signals will not enhance the experience.
2. Skip the “free” CJO platforms. If an existing vendor offers you their solution for free, keep shopping for another vendor. “Free” means the solution is underdeveloped and needs credibility. The vendor will use your company logo (i.e., “Very Important Bank is using our CJO!”) to sell their first “paying” customer on it. You don’t want to be a beta tester for a vendor who’s still working out the bugs in its CJO. “You get what you pay for” applies to your customer journey orchestration platform. If the deal sounds too good to be true, the solution probably isn’t ready. You’ll waste time and money on a buggy system and risk further harming your customer experience.
3. See it in action. Be on alert for vendors that default to slideware instead of a production-level product demonstration. Ask for a live demo that showcases how the platform tackles your specific challenges. Imagine your users navigating the system—is it user-friendly? Be sure to ask the right questions and dive deeper than generic features. The demo should highlight solutions that fit your needs. While client retention rates may be a good indicator, a better approach might be exploring successful case studies or asking industry analysts.

Choose a CJO Leader: CSG Xponent

CSG Xponent combines journey analytics, orchestration, digital communications, AI and expert services to achieve outstanding results for our customers. We offer pre-templated journeys for four industries—telecommunications, financial services, retail and healthcare—to achieve industry-leading ROI and adoption for our customers.