Journeys that adapt to customer needs in real time are key for CX50 members, the UK's top CX professionals named by Marketing Week, Zone and Cognizant Digital Experience.
Orchestrating customer journeys is an interesting phrase and one that, like those journeys, is multi-layered. It calls to mind, of course, the conductor keeping the various parts of the musical ensemble to time and in tune – all working together to deliver the product in the way people expect.
But it’s more than this. To orchestrate isn’t just to organise, it’s also to lead. The conductor doesn’t just help their musicians deliver the notes in the right order, they lend interpretation and bring the listener to new and unexpected places that surprise and delight.
And so in marketing, journey orchestration isn’t just the process of leading the customer effectively through a funnel. It is also watching carefully and knowing just the right moment to reveal new options, taking them to new places that both prolong and intensify that relationship.
Responsive content is a vital element of journey orchestration. It is the ability for organisations to take the raw materials of their brand and mould them in response to and anticipation of customer needs, whenever and wherever those occur.
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Remote working has led to greater reliance on technology platforms
How to orchestrate journeys that are music
to customers’ ears
CX50 — 2021
Of course, the potential for brands to engage with consumers across the journey is enormous and growing every day. New platforms, products, trends and needs make journey orchestration and the delivery of content immensely complex. To discover how brands manage the process most effectively, we asked three leading marketers from this year’s CX50 list – the UK’s top 50 customer experience professionals, as selected by Marketing Week, Zone and Cognizant Digital Experience – to share their insights.
The appliance of science and technology
It’s hard to mention the complexity of the consumer environment without mentioning the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in the same breath. It is generally accepted that, to make progress across personalisation, communication at scale, recommendations and more, intelligent automation holds the key. But nuance is equally important.
“AI is powerful but it needs to be controlled and used appropriately,” Edmundson insists. “It’s a route to accelerated learning rather than to accelerated decision-making.” He notes that his caution may well be attributed to the sensitive nature of Bupa’s business: “A piece of content about shoes is different to one diagnosing conditions.” However as something that underpins strategy, he agrees AI is invaluable. “The most exciting thing is its propensity to give you a lot of learning, fast.”
For Very’s O’Brien it is AI’s ability to learn more about customers and feed personalisation that she finds invaluable. “It’s about getting you down into the micro-personalisation, where otherwise there are too many variations. It lets us unlock personalisation at scale and put the most relevant communications in front of the customer.” This is more than a nice-to-have, she adds. It’s about meeting expectations. “Customers know you have that information. They expect you to use it to deliver the best experience.”
What does the customer of 2022 want? Watch CX50 members debate at the Festival of Marketing
Eve’s Calverley notes that technology is often both a blessing and a curse, there to solve complexity while also adding to it. She acknowledges that the sleep wellness company is perhaps in an advantageous position of currently not having that much complexity in the business and it’s something she’s keen to maintain. “We’d rather offer fewer services and get them right. The more complicated the business, the more technology you need. Martech can seem like a bit of a holy grail but it can tie up the business and stall progress. We can’t afford our progress to stall.”
“We need to understand the customer journey start to finish and which bits of which teams are in which place.”
Cheryl Calverley, Eve Sleep
Create strong foundations
“There are three critical foundational layers,” says Very.com CMO Carly O’Brien. “The first is data and starts with the single customer view. You have to be able to draw the insights and access them in real time. The second is the martech we need to orchestrate those end-to-end journeys. We don’t want channels and silos. The last bit is to do with people, how we fuse the data experts with consumer experience-focused marketers.”
Fellow CX50 member Rob Edmundson, chief customer and transformation officer at Bupa Global, India and UK, agrees that, individually, these elements are important but it’s how they work together that creates the secret sauce. “The obvious foundation is data. But you have to put that data into action. Many organisations, including Bupa, are changing their way of working to be more customer-led than function-led.”
He points out that the need to track customers across a range of interactions in the company, even when completing a single action such as signing up to an insurance policy, means making sure multiple departments have access to data and are able to act on it in the relevant way. “It’s finding a way to work multidimensionally,” he says.
In such a digital-focused world it is tempting to forget the human element. How teams work together, not just to solve customer needs but to design those journeys and how they will be managed, is so important. Eve Sleep CEO Cheryl Calverley has seen the challenge from both sides of the coin, first at a large institution – The AA – and now at a much smaller, nascent business.
“In Eve everything is a lot more analogue. Strategically, we need to understand the customer journey start to finish and which bits of which teams are in which place. It’s the customer team thinking about the needs of the delivery team then the customer service team giving feedback on how it’s all working. This is much more a human conversation rather than one managed by platforms and algorithms. It’s managed by people talking to each other,” she adds.
“We need to understand the customer journey start to finish and which bits of which teams are in which place.”
— Cheryl Calverley, Eve Sleep
“Data insights have to be
serviceable in real time.”
— Carly O’Brien, Very
If challenged, go back to basics
All our interviewees agreed that the major hurdles encountered when attempting to smooth the customer journey and serve responsive, real-time communications, come from a lack of solid foundations. “If you’re not well-organised or focused, you’ll suffer,” Edmundson warns. “Keeping experiences in context, maintaining that seamlessness and consistency all comes down to getting a decent view of the customer.”
O’Brien adds that this won’t be possible if the organisation is still working in silos, which causes both confusion and delay. “Data insights have to be serviceable in real time. Getting the right experts together in the room is one of the biggest hurdles – but it can be worked through.”
Indeed, Calverley has been working on just that. While Very’s O’Brien’s has a “squad-style” approach, where different functions get together on a problem, Eve has a series of cross-functional teams, which come together to work on a metric for six months and then disband, making space for the next team to solve for a different issue. This helps the business stay focused on core challenges and creates a drive to the solution. “If we tried to solve everything all the time, we’d solve nothing,” she insists.
Edmundson concludes that you can have all the technology in the world but you also have to understand the changing nature of the customer. That means knowing how to treat customers differently, but the same. It’s a balancing act, to serve different segments not just the right content but also in the right format, on the right platform, and under a single brand and tone of voice. But it’s critical, he argues: “Even if you’ve got the best techniques, if your delivery mechanism isn’t right, you won’t succeed.”■