What is Journey Orchestration and How Can You Use It for Better Experiences?

In order for brands to achieve truly one-to-one, hyper-personalization, it’s critical for you to understand each customer’s unique behavior and that starts with journey orchestration. Point blank – your customers’ loyalty is hanging on by your personalization efforts. In fact, 63% of consumers say they will stop buying from brands after receiving poorly personalized experiences, while 72% of consumers say they only engage with brands when the experience is personalized.

Keep reading to learn more about journey orchestration and how to use it to keep up in today’s post-pandemic data climate.

Why Do Brands Need Journey Orchestration?

It’s no secret that the pandemic changed the way marketers engage with customers and forced brands to dive headfirst into digital transformation.

However, while digital transformation persists and digital experience expectations continue to evolve, we have also reached a pivotal turning point in this new era. 

More specifically, the CX landscape will never return to how it was pre-pandemic and brands are now realizing that the new data management processes and customer experience campaigns they hastefully implemented during the pandemic are actually here to stay for the long haul. 

With that, brands are now also recognizing the need for tools that will simplify and secure these new processes and campaigns to replace their temporary patchovers they implemented to stay afloat.

Journey orchestration solutions are a perfect example of this as brands are adopting them in order to keep up with these lasting market changes below: 

• A demand for digital transformation. As mentioned, the pandemic supercharged digital transformation and it will continue to be the backbone for new consumer behaviors and attitudes. With journey orchestration, brands can more easily navigate these changes and create a foundation that fosters long-term agility.
• Omnichannel behavior. The pandemic drove customers away from offline, brick and mortar stores to only and all online channels and back again. That said, your customers are now engaging with you in every possible way from mobile to desktop to in-store and beyond. Journey orchestration can help you connect and capitalize on all of those insights in real time and drive experiences that are actually relevant to your customers.
• Personalization expectations. 62% of consumers expect brands to personalize every interaction and 74% said they feel frustrated enough to abandon the experience when the offer is irrelevant to them. With a journey orchestration solution, brands can obtain a better understanding of their customers and deliver one-to-one marketing communications that are also scalable.

What Actually is Journey Orchestration?

Journey orchestration is the process of stringing together omnichannel customer touch points to better understand their behavior and then using those insights to map out and trigger campaigns that you believe will deliver the most value to those customers.

You can also think about journey orchestration as the red string evidence wall in your favorite crime show that the detective, or in this case marketer, uses to connect interactions, events, and locations (or channels) to identify who a person is, why they’re behaving a certain way, and how to best find/communicate with them.

Simply put though, journey orchestration enables your brand to:

• Capitalize on all of your customers interactions in real time and deliver true omnichannel personalization
• Tailor the entire customer journey and foster long-term loyalty while increasing customer lifetime value
• Break down data silos and reduce customer turnover by driving consistent, relevant experiences
• Provide more consistent experiences by aligning with your customers’ views of your brand

Again, brands have graduated from one-to-many marketing to one-to-one marketing that’s scalable and journey orchestration is the key to achieving that.

What is the Right Approach to Journey Orchestration?

So, what is the right approach to journey orchestration?

There are many tools out there who offer journey orchestration and even platforms themselves dedicated to just that. However, most solutions are either too narrow in that they don’t capture and address the full picture of a customer. 

Additionally, other solutions simply don’t capture the right data or even accurate data as third-party cookies interfere and data privacy laws make identity resolution difficult. Lastly, journey orchestration-only solutions often are not scalable and sound great in theory but can’t actually keep up with the variability of real life.

For brands who have adopted these solutions, they’ll find these challenges create very limited journeys that do not actually span across a meaningful part of the overall customer journey. Because of this, their journey orchestration strategy could actually end up doing the opposite of its intended goal and result in irrelevant experiences that push customers away.

That said, Tealium is committed to developing a unique solution that compliments our CDP to provide brands with a more holistic and evolving picture of each customer’s journey.

More specifically, Tealium’s CDP collects trusted, accurate, first-party data and unifies it in real time to create comprehensive customer journeys and 360º customer profiles. Tealium also works with any vendor or integration in your stack, making sure the insights you need to fully understand your customers journeys do not get left in silos.

Additionally, we believe that visualizing the entire journey perfectly is less important than understanding what’s happening at each node or touch point in a customer’s journey. This allows you to prioritize what to do at the node level and then create templates for channel actions at each step instead of triggering campaigns at the journey level that may not actually be a best fit.

What we’re really saying is Tealium is a one-stop shop. Yes, you can plug and play with your existing tech but when it comes to a journey orchestration solution, you want something that is directly connected to your data hub that’s at the center of your entire stack.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Tealium can help you achieve a truly one-to-one marketing strategy that is still scalable, get a demo today!