The other day, I had a look at my blog, checking the articles that resonated with you most in 2023.

Today, I'd like to do the same for my YouTube channel, CRMKonvos. Shameless plug - any new subscriber is cordially welcomed - it means a lot to us. "Us" means my colleagues Ralf Korb and Marshall Lager, and I. We run this channel as a joint endeavor.

CRMKonvos are all about fun and friendly one hour conversations with one or more live expert guest about a topic in the wider area of - you guessed correctly - CRM. Of course, this includes related topics, e.g., it is virtually impossible to talk CRM or CX without touching AI. They are streamed to LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and X. In addition, we actively encourage our audience to engage with our guest and us. Again, any new subscriber is more than appreciated. If I am not totally off, you can subscribe by just clicking this link.

But now, what are the CRMKonvos that resonated most with you? Which ones received the most views? 

Of course, we do not want to get the beans spilled immediately, so let's start with the fifth place.

Culture is the most enduring form of capital.

This is a conversation I had with Zoho's Chief Strategy Officer Vijay Sundaram about why a great corporate culture makes all the difference, how it contributes to success and why and how Zoho's culture is different from that of most other companies.

The fourth place is taken by an ISP's journey with Zoho One.

This is an interview with Amit Rai, Chief HR Officer of Tata Fiber. Amit has overseen the implementation of Zoho One at Tata Fiber right from its beginning. He relates the interesting journey the company had and also relays obstacles that he needed to overcome. Moving up the leaderboard, we reach the bronze medalist.

Ulaa, Zoho's new privacy oriented browser is about why a privacy oriented browser is important, especially for businesses.

Tejas Gadhia of Zoho tells us about Ulaa and what sets this browser apart from the pack and gives us an idea of what lies ahead. Ulaa itself is a Chromium based browser that Zoho "de-Googled". If you want to venture a guess how long it took to remove all ET-like behavior ("calling home") from the Chromium engine, add a comment.

Moving on to the runner up. This video is different from the first three in two respects. First, it is a 2021 video. Second, it does not involve Zoho. We asked "What is customer journey orchestration"? Ray Gerber gave us a succinct answer.

This is an important question and who is in a better position to answer it than Ray Gerber, the mastermind behind Thunderhead (n.b., Thunderhead got acquired by Medallia in early 2022 and Ray moved on to Qualtrics).

Which leaves us with the CRMKonvo that caught your interest most in 2023. It is an atypical one. Atypical in the sense that it is not directly about business but about how and why a business set up a school in a very rural area in southern India. We spoke with Akshaya Sivaraman, the head of Kalaivani Kalvi Maiyam about why doing good is good for business.

Kalaivani Kalvi Mayam is a school established by Zoho in a rural area near Tenkasi. Due to its wild success, it also serves Zoho as a template for further education centers.

This was a fascinating conversation with Akshaya Sivaraman, the head of Kalaivani Kalvi Mayam, diving into the school's origin, mission, future, and how it benefits the community as well as Zoho.

To close, let's briefly give a honorable mention to our videos that came up place six to ten:

Adi Mula, CEO of Foodhub relays his journey with Zoho  during ZohoDay 2022. Yes, another video from an earlier year makes it into the top ten.

Prashanth V K talks about how Zoho steadily moves upmarket from the SMB- into the enterprise market and what their strategy is.

You think that AI companies are only founded in the USA (and India and China)? AI made in Germany, winning hedgehog style tells how a German company leverages AI to create a real-time predictive customer view.

In the state of SaaS adoption in the current economy, we discuss how SaaS companies can and do thrive in a post Covid economy that is also plagued by inflation with two SaaS executives.

Last but not least, we assembled a panel of AR pros to discuss how great analyst relations should look like. And by pros, I mean PROs. With Sarita Kincaid, Sandy Lo, Trish Harman and Ludovic Leforestier we got some of the best talking out of the book.

All in all, you guys seem to have a healthy interest in Zoho.

Thanks again for viewing our videos and let me know via the comments if there are other CRM/CX related topics that you would like us to cover.

All the best for 2024.

It is the end of 2021 and I do not have anything better in mind than writing a last post for the year. So let's do it.

There have been some terms that were used more than others with some of them actually being quite hyped. Some of them for the right reasons, some of them for the wrong ones.

My favorites of these terms include in no particular order:

• Metaverse
• NFT (non-fungible token)
• RPA or robotic process automation
• Hyper personalization
• Hyper automation
• Customer Journey Orchestration
• Low code / No code
• Artificial intelligence / machine learning

Hyper personalization

I already did a short video that expresses my thoughts on hyperpersonalization. You cannot really avoid the term when browsing the web with anything related to CX in mind. Back in the day, what is now called hyper personalization was called one-to-one marketing. This was in the eighties. The problem was that we didn’t have the technology nor the computing power to technically implement a contextually relevant 1:1 approach at scale and in real time. That’s why we worked with segments. 

Now we have the technology and computing power to address individuals contextually relevant in real time, nearly regardless of the size of the audience. Technologically, this is quite amazing, and if used consciously is of great benefit for customers and prospects. 

But there is nothing “hyper” about it. It is still personalization, maybe individualization. 

My wish for 2022: Let’s do away with the hyperbole before we start to desperately look for the next hyperlative – or should I call it ultralative?

Robotic process automation

No doubt, RPA is an important technology. It provides a fast and easy – maybe too fast and too easy – entry into digitalization of processes.

Its origins lie in automated UI based testing, applied to the automation of workflows.

Using RPA or its derivative intelligent RPA helps companies to increase the efficiency of their processes, especially if they stretch across various applications that have poor or no interfaces or that haven’t been integrated.

This works very well for processes that rely on structured data and in the case of intelligent RPA increasingly also with unstructured data.

Why too fast and easy then?

The problem is that it is hard to improve processes with RPA. Instead, existing processes get entrenched even more. This is also why it helps in digitalizing processes and not in a company’s digital transformation, which involves the creation of new, different processes. Still, it is an important technology as it helps reducing friction in existing processes, helping in reducing manual work and speeding processes up considerably. As a consequence, both employee experience and customer experience can get improved considerably.

My wish for 2022: Let’s merge RPA into workflow automation because this is what it is.

Low code / no code

We have seen low- and no code for a few years now but it really popped into people’s minds in 2021. Related terms are “citizen developer” and “democratization of development”. 

Again, another important technology that improved a lot over the decades. 

Yes, it is available for decades. Look at all the abilities to customize that enterprise systems offer for a long time. Admittedly, it often looked ugly and was not that easy to understand, but still, it was there.

Low code and now code have a tremendous value in workflow automation and systems configuration. 

My wish for 2022: May there be sufficient governance to avoid the database hell that we experienced in the good ole Lotus Notes times (or have these been the bad ole days?).

Hyper automation

This term is worth a rant. Gartner defines hyper automation as “a business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. Hyperautomation involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools or platforms, including

• Artificial Intelligence (A)
• Machine Learning
• Event-driven software architecture
• Robotic process automation (RPA)
• Business process management (BPM and intelligent business process management suites (iBPMS)
• Integration platform as a service (iPaaS)
• Low-code/no-code tools
• Packaged software
• Other types of decision, process and task automation tools”

There are many more definitions like this, published by many pundits. 

Automation exists like, forever. It is one of the very reasons for the existence of software. And it always included the use of multiple technologies, tools and platforms. Just adding a bunch of shiny category names that can be used to the definition, doesn’t add any hyper to automation.  

My wish for 2022: Let’s cut the crap and name it as what it is: automation or process automation. Sorry for these sharp words but here we are inventing a term just for the sake of inventing a term. This doesn’t add any value besides making some pundits appear important and/or visionary (with the emphasis on appear).

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)

There is no doubt that these two terms describe a set of technologies that are immensely powerful, given the availability of enough computing power. Machine learning is a subset of what artificial intelligence is. The technologies have entered a trajectory away from technology for technology’s sake towards being embedded into business process and outcome oriented. The technology itself is mutating from a kind of silver bullet to a mere helper. Of course, this is not always the case. There are still areas where AI is overrated, sometimes even dangerous. We are also seeing ethical problems and biased AI come up. Still, with the ongoing change the acceptance of AI and ML have increased a lot. 

My wish for 2022: May we see a continuation on this path along with an increasing focus on explainability and ethics. May we also continue to see “human augmented by machine” instead of “human replaced by machine”.

Metaverse

I have kept my three favorite ones till the end, the metaverse and, related to it, web 3.0, that is currently in everybody’s mouth being one of them. The preliminary peak of the hype was Facebook changing its corporate name to meta in October 2021.

Right now, nobody can credibly say what the metaverse will be, except that it will be a significant development towards communication and collaboration. But what is obvious is that metaverse will be another evolution of the platform play. It will be seen as a significant source of new business. The players are already lining up to achieve “dominance”. With the likely consequence that the “metaverse” will be broken down into a couple of walled gardens that are intended to further the garden owners’ agenda and lack interaction/integration. This breaks at least the first four of Tony Parisi’s seven rules of the metaverse.

So far, the metaverse reminds me of the gold rush at the Klondyke river. Many people rush there, most will return disillusioned (if at all) and a few (platform) players got incredibly rich.

My wish for 2022: Call me a dreamer but may there be a strong focus on above mentioned four rules, in particular openness and that no individual entity controlling it.

Non-fungible tokens

A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique and non-interchangeable unit of data that is linked to a blockchain. It cannot be copied, substituted or subdivided. NFTs gained notoriety for being electronic identifiers that confirm the ownership of digital collectibles.

NFTs are closely related to the topics of blockchain, which is still trying to find a compelling use case, digital twins, and metaverse, which drives its hype. 

Given that, NFTs are yet another example of a solution in search of its problem. Or the other way round, it creates a totally new market for the exchange of digital assets.

The crux seems to be that everything seems to be around virtual, as opposed to physical assets. This means that, as long as no metaverse emerges, NFTs are actually not creating value but destroy it. Looking at sites like Decentraland where companies recently bought chunks of “real estate” for millions of dollars reminds me strangely of Second Life. But then, maybe I am just not creative enough to understand.

My wish for 2022: May we find a compelling use case for NFTs that creates a solution for an unsolved problem or provides a solution for a solved problem that is better than the existing ones.

Customer Journey Orchestration

I want to end this post on a positive note, that’s why I left customer journey orchestration to the end.

Customer journey orchestration is a technology that actually exists and that has some benefits. It helps businesses to think outside-in and to come to a mindset that their success is the consequence of making their customers successful. Implemented properly, it enables the identification of customers intents in real-time and to offer them touch points of their choice on their journey towards the solution to their challenge at hand (or job-to-be-done, if you will). It helps businesses to identify unnecessary friction in customer journeys and to remove it.

My wish for 2022: May we increase our understanding that automated processes like automated marketing campaigns are not customer journeys. 

It is this time of the year and I want to extend a heart-felt Thank You! to all my readers who honour me by investing your time into reading my posts, sharing and commenting on them.

Thank You!

Below is the list of the top 10 posts read by you in 2021

#10: How to avoid the looming CRM crisis

#9: The Dirty Dozen of 2021 Trends (maybe I should revise this one for 2022?)

#8: CRMKonvo - Freshworks on Platform, CRM and useful AI

#7: Outlaw Spirit - Lessons from The Zoho Analyst Day 2021

#6: How to orchestrate customer journeys in real time at scale

#5: Digitization, Digitalization, Digital Transformation - A Stake in the Ground

#4: With Oracle Fusion Marketing into the Future of CRM?

#3: Together, Zoom and Five9 shape a new market (well, in the light of this merger having failed ... they could have shaped a market. Still, a very readable one)

#2: Nimble strengthens its ability to be where the user is

#1: Ecosystem Play, One Game at a Time

Obviously, I do not know yet in detail what I am going to write about in 2022. however, I strive to make it as valuable for you as this year - at least

Bonne Année!

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.