MarTech » Customer Journeys» Prepare for Customer Journey Orchestration: Getting Started with CJO
Customer Journey Orchestration (CJO) provides brands with the means to create omnichannel personalized experiences for consumers capacity, which increases the likelihood of initial conversion and long-term loyalty. Doing this well requires a combination of people, processes and platforms to coordinate work. This means that in order to understand how to be successful, we should look at it in terms of these three categories: people, processes and platforms.
First in a three-part series, I’ll discuss the “people” part of preparing your organization for success with customer journey orchestration.
After all, although CJO involves a lot of technical integration, anyone who has implemented it knows that there are team members — people — who are critical in these two initial implementations behind the work and realize its potential.
Let’s explore this by looking at five key teams or groups whose participation is necessary for success.
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Stay with the leadership Agree
First, let’s talk about the role of leadership in a successful CJO implementation. Planning, implementing, and continuously improving a CJO often requires significant changes to processes, resources, and expected outcomes. Because of this, leadership support is needed to make these major changes happen.
Make sure your CJO work has an executive or lead sponsor. You will inevitably encounter obstacles or areas where executive buy-in will go a long way toward solving the problem.
Make sure you lead on the same page as your executive. Mismatched expectations about goals, time, cost, and long-term resource needs can lead to frustration at best, and at worst, they waste valuable time and resources coordinating.
One way to help adjust expectations is to keep leaders in the loop. Make sure they’re up-to-date, notify them of any current or potential roadblocks you encounter, and share your “wins” with them so they can communicate with other leaders. Chances are, you will need stakeholders from multiple areas of your business to support you.
Leadership support is critical to both the short- and long-term success of the CJO program. Don’t underestimate this as you proceed.
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Marketing and Customer Experience Teams
CJO’s most impactful teams will be those responsible for communicating with marketing and customers. Depending on your organization, you may have separate marketing and customer experience (CX) teams, or there may be overlap. Regardless, CJO can be a huge help with new customer acquisition, existing customer growth and engagement, and customer retention and support issues.
Keep in mind that CJOs often require closer collaboration between teams and disciplines within the Marketing and CX fields. This means that if your email team and your website team are siloed, they’ll need to start working more closely together, because orchestration works best when teams coordinate their messaging — and it’s often needed.
You also need to determine who or which role will be responsible for designing and managing your customer journey. In some cases, this might be a similar role to the person planning your event, while in other cases it might be an entirely new role that you need to create.
Get started, look at your current collaboration tools and methods for coordinating campaigns across channels, and determine if they will continue to work for you. If you introduce customer journeys, do you need to change the way you coordinate teams and their activities and content creation.
Finally, even if you only did this recently, go through the process of mapping the customer journey again with orchestration in mind. Beyond the customer perspective, pay special attention to the systems, data, and teams involved in the different stages of the journey. Even if you feel like you already know the customer journey very well, you’ll be surprised how rewarding this is.
The Marketing and Customer Experience team is the Chief Administrative Officer. These teams are necessary to drive strategy and continuous improvement over time.
Data and Engineering Team
Customer journey orchestration will also involve your data and engineering teams. Their involvement in the early stages may be more important than in the later stages — after all, part of the benefit of a CJO is putting the power of orchestration in the hands of marketing professionals — but they’ll be involved no matter what.
As you go through the planning process for your CJO implementation,are a few questions to ask, including:
What data is required for the CJO to succeed? Where is this data currently stored?
how much time is required Is there a place to request new data once and is there a process that makes it easy to get this data?
Customer journey orchestration will also involve your data and engineering teams. Their involvement in the early stages may be more important than in the later stages — after all, part of the benefit of a CJO is putting the power of orchestration in the hands of marketing professionals — but they’ll be involved no matter what.
As you go through the planning process for your CJO implementation,are a few questions to ask, including:
- What data is required for the CJO to succeed? Where is this data currently stored?
how much time is required Is there a place to request new data once and is there a process that makes it easy to get this data?
What are both CJOs short- and long-term engineering needs? Are these roles currently in place or do they need to be hired or outsourced?
Then, to continue deploying the right pieces with your data and engineering teams, work collaboratively and make sure you share the big picture with them. This includes getting stakeholders from data and engineering onboard the CJO from the start.
Your data and engineering teams are key to a successful implementation, and their early involvement will ensure that everyday users of your new CJO platform will have the tools they need.
customer service
Just as marketing and CX teams will help shape the acquisition, education, and engagement parts of the customer journey, your customer service team is critical to shaping the journey to help customers precisely when they need it.
As you work with your customer service team to plan your CJO, consider the following so that it can benefit marketing goals as well as customer support and overall CX goals:
- How recent service/support interactions affected customers propensity to buy, and how does this affect the type of ct content and orchestration for you (and when)?
Orchestrate how to proactively “solve” customers may encounter potential issues or questions to support customer service?
Some initial steps you can take with customer service include working closely, discussing common problems and potential problem areas, and brainstorming about potential opportunities. In the type of real-time environment CJO allows, customer support can be a key ally in maintaining customer satisfaction and engagement.
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sales team
Some initial steps you can take with customer service include working closely, discussing common problems and potential problem areas, and brainstorming about potential opportunities. In the type of real-time environment CJO allows, customer support can be a key ally in maintaining customer satisfaction and engagement.
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sales teamLast but not least, let’s not forget the sales team. After all, depending on your organization, your sales team may be in direct contact with your customers while they are also participating in an automated customer journey. This is especially important in a B2B environment, where the sales process is very frequent, but it also applies to B2C.
Make sure the sales team knows about the automated processes you include in the CJO so they know when they do one-on-one outreach. It is also recommended that you discuss and brainstorm with your sales staff when is a personal style, when is the right choice, and vice versa.
As with other teams we’ve discussed, healthy collaboration is key to building ongoing dialogue and discussing potential challenges and opportunities.
Coordination with your sales team can make the difference between potential customer confusion and a harmonious CJO experience.
in conclusion
Customer journey orchestration requires the coordination and coordination of multiple teams in order to be successful. Ensuring this consistency from the outset will yield the best results and making sure everyone embraces this new way of reaching and engaging customers.
In the next article, I’ll discuss process considerations when preparing for a CJO implementation.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest authors and not necessarily those of MarTech. The authors of the staff are listed here.
