What is Customer Journey-Orchestration?

Businesses must improve customer experience (CX) to boost satisfaction, loyalty and customer lifetime value.

Sounds pretty obvious, doesn’t it? Who wouldn’t want to do that? Unfortunately, getting CX right is much easier said than done.

Despite more than 80% of business leaders prioritizing CX improvement, CX quality declined in 2023 for the second consecutive year. According to a survey of 484 global CX leaders, 74% find it somewhat to extremely challenging to identify where to start when improving customer journeys and experiences.

Enhancing CX requires an understanding of customers and their journeys as they engage with your brand. Customer journeys are complicated, often involving many channels and circuitous paths. Almost half (40%) of CX leaders indicated that a lack of understanding or appreciation for customer journeys is one of their biggest challenges to improving CX.

Customer journey orchestration makes sense of—and enhances—customer journeys.

What Is a Customer Journey?

According to Forrester, a journey is a customer’s path and perceptions as they pursue a goal.

• Customers: Individuals or groups, like a family or buying group
• Path: Includes interactions with your business, other businesses, and other people. It also includes things customers do by themselves.
• Perception: Emotions and interpretation of value
• Goal: What customers want to achieve (NOT being acquired or onboarded)

Journeys occur during all six stages of the customer experience lifecycle:

• Discover (research products and services)
• Buy (purchase products or services)
• Onboard and delivery (receive purchased products, activate cards or services, schedule medical appointments)
• Use and manage (change account details, report suspicious behavior, receive alerts about suspicious behavior)
• Support and resolve (pay bills, return a purchased product, schedule service appointments, receive proactive outage notifications)
• Grow (receive targeted offers, renew and upgrade contract)

The customer decides what actions to take at each step in the process, but the business has an opportunity to influence those decisions and behaviors/Done well, it can lead to improving the customer experience and increasing loyalty and lifetime value.

What Is Customer Journey Orchestration?

Forrester defines customer journey orchestration (CJO) as “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.” According to a Forrester analyst, “you can use customer journey orchestration (CJO) to drive journey success for customers and your company across touchpoints and silos, orchestrate hyper personalized journeys across a variety of systems using AI, and learn and adapt to evolving customer intent to deliver empathetic experiences.”

Unlike most CX or Voice of the Customer tools that provide reports after the customer interacts with your brand, CJO provides real-time analysis of behavior and action to adjust the journey while it is happening.

How Does CJO Work?

Journey orchestration doesn’t analyze personas or segments. CJO works on the level of an individual customer.

A CJO system includes three essential components:

Digital communication. An omnichannel communication system delivers consistent messages to customers via multiple, coordinated channels:

• Email
• SMS
• MMS
• Voice (Interactive Voice Response and Outbound Voice)
• Mobile app (push notifications)
• Conversational AI (chatbots and virtual assistants)

Customer journey analytics. Journey analytics analyzes current behavior and predicts future behavior. Journey analytics tracks and measures every interaction with your brand, across every channel (e.g., website, email or SMS) and device (e.g., laptop, tablet or smartphone) the customer uses. Journey analytics tools provide insight into why customers are doing what they’re doing. Journey analytics uses artificial intelligence to analyze customer data, detect intent, predict customers’ needs and determine what their next best action should be.

Real-time decisioning. A decisioning engine adjusts message delivery based on each customer’s interactions. Predictive analytics and AI (machine learning) identify critical paths in the customer journey, determine context and intent, and enable real-time decision making to deliver relevant, personalized customer experiences. For example, if the CJO system detects that someone stopped completing a loan application, it immediately sends an email or text (based on the individual’s engagement history), prompting the person to submit the missing information.

Journey Orchestration Controls Communications to Prevent Communication Chaos

A journey orchestration system acts like an air traffic controller for all communications to prevent sending conflicting messages—or sending messages at the wrong time. For example, the system doesn’t send a “renew your contract” message to a customer who is in the middle of a service journey. Someone who is complaining about a billing error won’t be eager to sign up for another year of internet or mobile service.

Customer journey analytics and orchestration solutions enable CX leaders to:

• Analyze cross-channel customer journeys
• Identify and prioritize areas for improvements
• Orchestrate customer journeys in real time through channel guidance, personalization, outbound communications and next best actions

Turn Insights Into Action

CJO is all about signals—detecting, interpreting and acting on them. To get journey orchestration right, banks, telcos, healthcare organizations and retailers must be able to act upon all of the insights they’ve gleaned on their customers.

Fraud detection is important to build bank customers’ trust—and save money. A large bank reduced credit card fraud cases by 25% and inbound call volume by 12% by sending proactive fraud alerts.

The customer journey orchestration system proactively detects suspicious behavior on one or more of a customer’s accounts and notifies customers to validate and take action:

Example: Receive proactive alerts about suspicious behavior

• Detect customer behavior/signals

  • Detect suspicious behavior on one or more of the customer accounts

• Interpret the signals and determine whether/what action to take

  • Select the best communication channel, based on the individual’s preference and engagement history

• Deliver personalized interactions based on each customer’s journey and communication preferences

  • Notify the customer that one or more of their accounts (and associated cards) has been suspended due to suspicious behavior.
  • Confirm with the customer the authenticity of the transactions through an automated call or by directing them through the mobile app.

Example: Renew Contract (Promotional Roll-Off)

To retain customers who are approaching their promotional roll-off, communication service providers must communicate proactively, offering customers relevant services or packages based on usage history and presenting enticing deals before their contract expires.

The CJO system manages the customer journey, nudging customers to renew and upgrade their contracts:

• Detect customer behavior/signals

  • Detect that customer is approaching their contract renewal

• Interpret the signals and determine whether/what action to take

  • Decide the best upgrade offer and communication channel to retain the customer and get them to upgrade

• Deliver personalized interactions based on each customer’s journey and communication preferences

  • Deliver targeted upgrade offer to the customer
  • Follow up with customers who did not engage with the previous communication
  • Detect if customer is not responsive to upgrade offer. Initiate save/retention intervention by save/retention team.

Benefits of CJO

Customers using CSG Xponent, our industry-leading journey orchestration platform, have experienced:

• 25% reduction in number of fraud cases by using proactive fraud alert notifications
• $10M annual savings through a 12% reduction in number of calls related to fraud [by using proactive notifications]
• $93M incremental revenue lift from a 2% increase in prescription refills by using automated refill reminders
• $27M in annual savings by decreasing calls into the contact center by 43% by using intelligent routing (intent-based call routing)
• $30M revenue boost due to increased collections by using intelligent decisioning and optimized messages

Are you ready to take advantage of CJO?

CSG Xponent: CJO Made Simpler

CSG Xponent is an intelligent customer journey management platform that uses real-time data to personalize every touchpoint at an individualized level. It orchestrates departments and channels, anticipating your customers’ needs and delivering the right message, at the right time, in the right channel. Powered by a decisioning engine, Xponent leverages real-time insights and analytics to optimize customer journeys. This enables proactive next-best-action recommendations and unified communication across channels, driving higher customer engagement and satisfaction and better business outcomes.