Customer journeys are as individual as customers. Every customer has different needs, preferences, knowledge, information and another way to resolve their issues. In brief, every customer has a context of their own.

As a consequence, customer journeys are often non-linear and move across different channels and devices. In between the online steps there might very well be some offline steps. Customer journeys are usually emerging sequences of interactions or engagements between the customer and the business towards a goal. 

This goal needs to be the customer’s goal, albeit in the limitations of a business environment.

Customer journeys can, in fact, be compared to conversations, which are also not linear.

With this thinking, it is only a small step to the thought that customers do manage and orchestrate their journeys individually and for themselves. Consequently, there is no need to design their journeys for them. It can even be counterproductive. A better approach is to provide customers with a channel independent menu of interconnected contact points that helps them to achieve their objective, their way. With the company offering - potentially different - contact points to different customers, both parties’ needs are mostly fulfilled; the business need for efficiency, the customers need to build and follow their own journeys, and both parties’ need for effectiveness.

This raises the question about why we should be interested in these interconnected contact points.

The answer is quite simple. 

What is the objective?

Companies that are working towards supporting their customers’ needs and desires have an edge over their competitors. They have more success acquiring and retaining customers, even turning them into loyal advocates.

Industry expert and thought leader Graham Hill said in a recent CRMKonvo that “Customers don’t plan out their journeys in detail, instead, journeys ‘emerge’, one interaction at a time. We should design service experiences to allow interactions to emerge, not around fixed journeys”. He continues that it is our job “to create experience platforms that enable customers to interact with us faster, easier and better. What customers actually do is up to them. The more we constrain customers’ behaviour, particularly through rigid service experience design, the more customers are likely to continue their journey with someone else, or to abandon it entirely” (highlighted by Thomas Wieberneit). 

In other words, the objective is to be able to offer customers seamless journeys of their choosing to achieve their specific outcome in a way that is consistent with the brand message. Risking to sound like a broken record, as this point is important: This journey may well lead customers across devices. The journey is regularly not linear but has loops and may even be interrupted and resumed at the last, any earlier or even a later step.

Why at a later step? Because a part of the journey might have been executed outside the realm of the company.

And how to do this?

Contemporary thinking calls for the development of personas and customer journey mapping to identify the journeys the customers take, including the emotions that are raised at every single step - the contact points - of their journeys. According to Kristy Tupper, GM at Nuvolo, using customer journey mapping it is possible to identify the existing journeys as well as the intended to-be journeys. Combining the two helps identify the gaps that need to be closed to offer a better customer engagement that results in a better customer experience. Using this approach in a continuous learning process helps keep the customer experience at a level that satisfies both sides, the customers and the business.

Both, the development of personas and the creation of customer journey maps are well established industry practices - best practices, even.

That way, businesses get representations of their main customer groups and the main journeys that these customer groups take.

Sounds easy, doesn‘t it?

Well, it isn’t. The challenges of this approach are clear and include:

• The identification of journeys and the agreement on what main journeys are, take a lot of time and effort, unless this effort is done with an inside-out lens, which is not the lens that the customer uses.
• Customer journey mapping of these identified journeys itself takes a lot of time and effort as first the relevant personas need to get identified and then a sufficient number of representatives of these personas need to be interviewed in detail.
• Even when used in a repetitive approach that ensures regular improvement, customer journey management does not ensure a continuous improvement, as the process can only be done a few times per year, at best.
• The reduction to personas poses similar challenges as the identification of journeys. The most important personas need to be identified, defined, and refined over time. 

In a recent panel discussion (the topic starts around minute 40:30), Graham succinctly voiced his three main concerns about customer journey mapping. He thinks that customer journey maps are

• Unrepresentative, as they are overly simplistic in their approach. They do not model the paths that individual customers take but group them instead.
• Unrealistic, since they model a straight path instead of considering the loops and repetitions that are often involved in individual journeys.
• Unimplementable, as they are too high level to be mapped to systems that implement the various interactions.

Maybe, the name “customer journey map“ is just plain wrong or misleading? Let’s compare customer journey mapping to real world maps. One can say that what customer journey mapping actually resembles is the route calculation done by a navigation system in a sense that it gives a determined pathway - and maybe some options - from one place to another. A customer journey map is not a map, but a recipe to arrive at the destination, just that it is re-engineered instead of being planned.

Using the same allegory, the menu of interconnected contact points that I mentioned above is comparable to places and the connections between them are the roads between them. Combined, they form a map that shows the possible interactions that a customer can choose from to achieve their desired outcome. In contrast with customer journey mapping, this “interaction map” does not define a sequence of interactions nor is it dependent on personas. It defines the contact points, their inputs (the roads that lead to them) and their outputs (the roads that lead to other contact points), based on an identified context.

Of course many, if not most of these possible paths will be used by customers. 

So, what should you do? Clearly, customers can orchestrate their journeys only if the necessary contact points and their connections are available.

It is also clear that customer journey mapping does not work at scale and is too slow to enable fast reactions and optimizations by businesses. 

The future

The solution is to do contact point mapping, i.e. to establish the map of contact points and their connections. Contact point mapping is not only an extension of the real time analysis of individual customer journeys at scale but is a transformational approach. It identifies the individual customer‘s context and objective via customer data, including behavior and shared preference information at scale. The journey analytics part enables real time interaction management and customer journey orchestration by identifying the individual customer‘s context and objective without requiring personas. It takes the guesswork out of the journey mapping and replaces it by a solid, data driven foundation that is based on machine learning.

Probably, you know ask: But what about emotions, which are part of customer journey mapping?

Emotions get collected in two ways: structured and unstructured. Structured information about individual customer journeys is gathered via voice of the customer technologies while unstructured feedback can come in via sentiment analysis that is performed across channels, e.g. via email, social media comments or conversational user interfaces including voice but also text messages across various communication channels.

This way, using contact point maps in combination with customer journey analytics, it is possible to combine structured customer data with behavioral and emotional data for individual customers in the context of their specific intentions - without predefining a journey. 

The result is transformational. We are able to perform “customer journey mapping” continuously and in real time, scaling to individual customers. Additionally, it is possible to identify emerging contexts and contact points that do not work or work well for specific intentions. 

More importantly, it is also possible to improve the real time interaction engine to quickly react to changing interests/contexts and therefore to allow the journey orchestration engine to suggest journeys that are optimal for the individual customer.

This is something that in the words of Thunderhead’s Chief Solutions officer Ray Gerber could be called autonomous customer journey orchestration. It results in a smooth engagement that leads to a positive customer experience which is consistently in alignment with the brand. And this translates into better business results. Businesses are more effective, i.e. successful in acquiring and retaining customers, even converting them to ambassadors. Why? Because they get what they need and want. Additionally, there are internal benefits. Companies are able to enable new journeys faster and at a lower internal cost, i.e. they are more efficient. 

These benefits cannot be achieved without the combination of outside-in thinking,  journey analytics, real time interaction management and customer driven journey orchestration based upon contact point maps. 

And all this doesn‘t even touch on the power of ecosystems that emerges if contact points across different businesses are included in the contact map.

Following the great discussion about Customer Journey Orchestration that we had with Graham Hill it was obvious that this topic deserves and requires more attention. We had a lot of points and different terms, starting from customer journey management, customer managed journeys, customer journey analytics, customer journey mapping and so on. Provocative statements like "customer journey mapping is utterly useless" popped up and were discussed. Is this tool utterly useless? Well, the discussion shed some light!

So, we asked the most active participants of the chat conversation whether they would be up for a panel discussion. Graham Hill, Ray Gerber and Kristy Tupper agreed.

So, here we are with a panel discussion about this exciting topic. The three of them have different views that help in furthering our knowledge. The CRMKonvos team is really excited to host this discussion, which is cut in three sections.

Interested in the leading questions? Have a look at the next three short videos. Or dive right into the discussion, which is at the end of this post.

What is customer journey orchestration?

Who benefits most of Customer Journey Orchestration?

How do customer journey orchestration and customer journey mapping relate to each other?

These good questions and points of view opened up exciting and well received discussions. Enjoy watching them.

Customer Journey Orchestration is one of the hottest topics in the CRM/CEM/CX area right now. And it is a bigger one than you might think. It involves thinking about ecosystems, actors, outcomes, interactions, jobs-to-be-done and much more.

To get into the thick of it, we wanted to talk with someone who really knows this topic from the inside out, and is independent at the same time.

This person is Dr. Graham Hill, who has advised numerous companies across the globe for over 30 years now. As said, Graham knows his stuff and is a recognized thought leader in customer experience, interaction optimization and journey orchestration.

So, let us hear what he has to say! Spoiler alert: You will not regret it!

Join us in the discussion with Dr. Graham Hill, who has a keen eye on this topic from a services dominant logic point of view. Attend, participate, engage. You will not regret it.

Really!

It is time to talk about customer journeys and customer journey orchestration.

Again.

The theme of two of my recent articles has been about customer data. First, in my article Why you don’t want a 360-degree on the customer I rubbed the coveted 360-degree view on the customer, which is utterly meaningless as a contextually relevant view on the customer is required to take any decision or action.

Then I followed up with the view that a customer data platform (CDP) is not an end in itself but a means to an end.

Actually, two ends.

They are engagement and experience.

Back in the day when no one talked about CDPs I wrote in a guest post There is no customer experience without customer engagement to Paul Greenberg’s ZDNet column that a well-orchestrated CRM system sets the foundation “for every meaningful and relevant engagement, proactive (company initiated) as well as reactive (customer initiated), which covers all communication/engagement channels, and an increasing number of possible touch points. The CRM system, at its core, is channel- and touch point agnostic. But it supports and serves all of them, every single one – including those that we do not yet know of.

The customer engagement, as an ongoing process, itself happens via any number of interactions, the touch points chosen by the customer, but offered by the company”.

This is, of course, based on Paul’s definition that “customer engagement is the ongoing interaction between company and customer, offered by the company and chosen by the customer”.

Nowadays one could replace the term CRM with CDP, but how we call it doesn’t really matter. The point is that there is a system that collects and analyses data on customer interactions and offers it as actionable information. All this within the limits of what is legal, legitimate, as well as offered and consented to by the customer.

What is important is that what called touch points then and will call contact points going forward, form a customer journey when a customer interacts with them.

A little detour – why “contact point” instead of touch point?

Customers usually interact with a company to solve a need. This might be information or the desire to exercise or the need for a mobile communication, or whatever else. Take your pick.

To fulfill this need, customers interact with a lot of different assets, including the product and/or service itself. Looking at the mobile communication example, this is typically solved by interacting with a smart phone. This happens well post purchase and until the phone breaks or gets retired for good.

Touch point is a term that is marketing laden. This means that its scope ends at the point of the customer purchase, at the latest. Therefore, I prefer using another one, like contact point, which is not perfect either. Happy to get suggestions for a better term.

Coming back to Customer Journey Orchestration

Now, the ability to analyze the interactions that a customer has with a business’s contact points neatly leads to real time interaction management and its big brother, customer journey orchestration.

Customer journey orchestration is currently all about preparing paths to take for the customer. Nearly all vendors that work in the area supply software that helps in assembling these journeys. These journeys are like paved ways that the customer is supposed to take. While this is often meant to be an attempt to reduce process friction for the customer, this is inside-out thinking as opposed to outside-in thinking. It is also more often than not meant to simplify the engagement process for the company, akin of creating a funnel into which customers are guided.

On the other hand, customers cannot be assumed to take a linear journey. They regularly are on several journeys in parallel, change devices and/or communications channels, step back to get additional information, compare different vendors, and many more.

In brief, they follow their own, customer managed, journey instead of a journey that is managed by the company for them. However, the interactions along this journey are (mostly) in a context.

Or in the words of Graham Hill, who looks at this from a service-oriented logic angle: “Customers don’t plan out their journeys in detail, instead, journeys ‘emerge’, one interaction at a time. We should design service experiences to allow interactions to emerge, not around fixed journeys”. He continues that it is our job “to create experience platforms that enable customers to interact with us faster, easier and better. What customers actually do is up to them. The more we constrain customers’ behaviour, particularly through rigid service experience design, the more customers are likely to continue their journey with someone else, or to abandon it entirely”.

This has some serious consequences for the implementation of customer journey orchestration.

The very first of these consequences is a totally different mindset, one that looks at the customer journey out of the eyes of the customer instead of the corporate eyes. Don’t get me wrong, the interests of the business need to be considered, too, but these form boundaries for which contact points can and will be offered to customers.

This creates a need for massive and scalable real time customer journey analytics. Interactions of any given customer at any given contact point need to be analyzed in milliseconds to be able to deliver the best reaction to the customer’s action – the one that answers the immediate demand, anticipating the customer’s real interest. All this requires the customer’s current context. This is why a contextually actionable set of customer data needs to be available, which is the job of a CDP.

The third consequence is a need to design the contact points accordingly. They should be laid out like steppingstones or a menu of options that customers can take according to their own choosing. To do so, they need to be available throughout channels and to deliver information to the customer that is relevant right this moment, in the format that is appropriate for the channel of the customers’ choice. At the same time, they are collecting the data that is necessary to help customers moving forward on their individual journey, and which can be used by downstream contact points.

The requirement to be able to feed contact points independent of the channel also explains why personalization needs to be channel independent.

Don’t manage your customers’ journeys

Customer journeys are as individual as customers. Journeys are non-linear and move across different devices with some steps travelled offline.

Your customers will manage (and orchestrate) their journeys individually for themselves. So, there is no need to design journeys for them. it is even counterproductive. Instead, provide them with the platform and channel independent menu of interconnected contact points that help them to do it. Based upon a strong real-time customer journey analytics, this is the most powerful way to help your customers achieve their objectives their way and at their pace.