B2B customer journey orchestration & touchpoints mark the road map to successful client outcomes. By mapping the stages of your customer’s journeys, you can determine how to deliver clients’ desired products and gratifying experiences that encourage subscription renewals and increased revenue. Thus, customer journey B2B touchpoints serve as a potent instrument for boosting the efficacy of your customer success strategy.
In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know about B2B customer journey touchpoints and how to plan them to achieve outstanding customer success.
What Is B2B Customer Journey Orchestration?
Journey orchestration is understanding consumer behaviour across all channels and applying this information to map out personalized campaigns that engage your audience most effectively.
The B2B customer journey is the collection of touchpoints and interactions a client has with a B2B company, beginning with their initial interaction and extending beyond the purchase. Consider, for instance, a B2B buyer who discovers a SaaS software company that can meet their specific requirements. Journey orchestration enables the customization of consumer communication based on their behaviour. For instance, a consumer with an open service ticket may need to be more receptive to an email promoting a new offer or service. You may instead choose to direct them to the necessary assistance for their problem.
Why Do Businesses Need Journey Orchestration?
Companies can use the information to initiate campaigns or communications to provide additional value and a more personalized customer experience.
A customer journey orchestration strategy and toolset focus on a customer’s brand experience rather than how they bought.
Customer journey orchestration coordinates customer experiences in real-time, in an omnichannel environment, to better understand customer needs and encourage further brand interaction. Companies can use that information to trigger campaigns or communications to deliver more value and a more personalized customer experience. A customer journey orchestration strategy and toolset focus on a customer’s experience with a brand rather than a view of how that customer came to make a purchase. This ultimately focuses on increasing a customer’s lifetime value, ensuring a positive experience from the first customer touch point through post-sales and support.
Your Customers Deserve a Personalized Experience
Think about your own experience as a customer. Do you use multiple devices regularly throughout your day? Personalized customer experience refers to providing messaging, offers, suggestions, and more. It treats customers as individuals with unique preferences and tastes rather than part of a general audience or even a segment.
The Best Experiences Are Built Through Communication
Your audience doesn’t expect you to keep sending them promotions until one makes them buy. Your brand should listen to them. Journey orchestration is the greatest method to provide your audience with the experience they deserve and engage with them on the channels that matter. It turns your marketing into a dialogue, using each engagement to influence the next.
Personalization Is a Must For Modern Marketers
Personalization is more than just a goal for the future. It’s necessary for today’s brands who want to thrive in the modern market, providing a competitive advantage in today’s crowded digital marketplace. By orchestrating each step of the customer journey to fit a shopper’s unique needs, brands can create a customer experience that differentiates them from competitors. It’s the best way to improve customer relationship metrics across the board, from brand recognition to customer loyalty.
The Essential Steps To Map Out Customer Journeys
Every marketer knows the five basic steps of the customer journey:
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- The brand awareness phase, where the goal is to become a brand that customers trust.
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- The consideration phase is where customers weigh their options between brands.
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- The decision phase is where they choose their brand and complete a purchase.
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- The retention phase, where remarketing efforts try to keep them engaged.
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- The advocacy phase is where the customer becomes a champion of your brand.
Why is B2B customer journey orchestration important?
In most organizations, customer engagement involves various teams, such as marketing, sales, customer service and support. However, a customer’s experience across those teams must be more consistent.
How B2B Customer Journey Orchestration Works
Customer journey orchestration is an advanced form of customer journey management. It optimizes the customer experience using technology to create unique interactions with prospects and move them through the marketing and sales funnel.
Benefits Of Customer Journey Orchestration
The benefits of journey orchestration are real for the customer and the brand. By forcing organizations to break down silos to share data, it enables them to streamline processes and reduce inefficiencies through automation and coordination of touchpoints.
Benefits Of B2B Customer Journey Orchestration
The benefits of journey orchestration are real for the customer and the brand. By forcing organizations to break down silos to share data, it enables them to streamline processes and reduce inefficiencies through automation and coordination of touchpoints. In doing so, they gain insights into customer preferences, behaviours, expectations, and pain points, identifying contextually relevant data and providing access to the right people at the right time.
We’ve identified five benefits of implementing journey orchestration in your organization. They include:
- A more seamless, consistent, and personalized experience for the customer across all touchpoints, leading to increased engagement and satisfaction, and
- A better experience for employees, as well.
- A reduction in the number of customers who abandon what they’re doing because you’re eliminating friction points.
- An increase in the percentage of customers who achieve their desired outcomes because you have insights about them and where they are in the journey that you use to deliver the next best experiences.
- Easier and more fulfilling jobs for employees because they have the tools and the resources to help customers do just that.
Journey orchestration makes for a better experience all around, but for it to truly be as effective as it’s meant to be, there are a few requirements. In our latest Born Digital episode, we talked in detail about the critical requirements needed to succeed with journey orchestration and how organizational maturity plays an important factor. “It’s an evolution, not a revolution.”
Challenges Of Customer Journey Orchestration The Top 5 Challenges
There are several challenges businesses and brands face when they approach customer journey orchestration. As with all business initiatives, a healthy understanding of the pain points others encounter while implementing customer journey orchestration can help you avoid potential pitfalls that can slow or even derail the process entirely.
Culture
A collaborative culture is necessary as various departments across the organization are involved in delivering the journey you’re trying to orchestrate. If your culture is not one of collaboration or customer-centric, those siloes will hinder this work. A company’s operational, functionally based silos actively prohibit collaboration among team members. Ninety-seven per cent of executives surveyed by the American Management Association agree that silos hurt their company and must be broken down.
Legacy Systems
Disparate and legacy systems (data platforms, transactional platforms, etc.) can orchestrate the customer journey. Purpose-built journey orchestration technology is needed to overcome this problem. With the proper systems, businesses can correctly analyze the multiple trips and micro-journeys customers may take, preventing them from optimizing their customer experience.
Data Issues
Data is at the heart of designing and delivering a great customer experience. Customer journey analytics is vital to understanding the present and future ways customer interface with a business or brand. To orchestrate the journey, companies must have data that is accessible, complete, and accurate. Those data requirements take a lot of work to meet, further placing data and its quality as a big obstacle to achieving your orchestration goals. Orchestration will only be as good as the data. Mary Catherine Plunkett, Director of Customer Success Strategy & Programs at Autodesk, stated that you have to assume that you have only about 50% of the data you’ll need and then build out the orchestration based on knowing that.
Cost
For some, the sheer cost of the orchestration work required due to the effort and inefficiency caused by the first three items in this list has caused it to stall. While purpose-built platforms can help businesses push through some of this, companies need everything else to be aligned. In the sports world, cost-benefit ratios are often described colloquially as no risk it, no biscuit, which means if you never risk the cost of failure, you’ll never reap the rewards of success. The cost level valued against the potential benefit is different for every business. Still, it shouldn’t be the sole reason for not succeeding at something as important as the customer experience. Especially when commercial benefits like a reduced service cost come from the analytics that improved customer journey orchestration can provide.
Value
Customer journey orchestration is the toughest to sell to decision-makers. Mary Catherine Plunkett said the notion is great, but proving its value is hard. How does it benefit the company and the customer? To get executive support and resources, this is crucial. With that, you’ll have a lot better chance of success because the goal is to provide a seamless and consistent client experience, and the only way to achieve “consistent” is to have every department on board.
Customer journey orchestration faces numerous challenges. They help businesses succeed. Customer journeys are becoming more complicated and valuable. Improved client experiences always boost long-term revenue.
Understanding that customer journey orchestration is a process, not a result, is essential. Journey orchestration requires administrative support, financial commitment, and cross-team alignment. To successfully implement Customer Journey Orchestration, read our free practical guide.
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