essful customer journey operation: Collaboration across people processes data and platforms

Most brands place a high priority on creating a great experience for their customers, because they value not only the products and services that they buy but the whole journey. Delivering on this promise can be more difficult than it seems.

To support your initial journeys, you need the right team and data. You also need technology infrastructure, processes, and the appropriate technology. It is important to continuously improve customer journeys based on actual performance.

All this adds to the need for Customer Journey Operations, which is a discipline that brings together people, platforms, data, and processes along with systems of optimization and improvement. Three crucial aspects of customer journey operations should be taken into consideration: collaboration, governance, and continuous improvement.

This first of three articles will discuss the collaborative aspects of creating a successful customer journey. It requires four components: people, processes, data, and platforms.

People collaboration

Let’s begin with some of the key teams who will support and manage customer journeys, and how they must collaborate. People component of customer journey operation includes internal teams who support customers along their journey.

Product and Service Lines

The teams or departments may focus on specific products or services. Customer journeys often include moving between services or suggesting complementary products to customers who show a propensity to be benefited by them.

Many enterprises may have siloed teams that are incentivized and motivated to encourage customers to choose their products and services, rather than share the wealth.

Customer journey operations break down these silos, allowing customers to be more easily shown products and services they will find valuable and relevant. Customer journey operations allows customers to be shown the products and services that are most relevant and valuable for them.

Teams for marketing and communication channels

Included in this are teams that focus on email, social networks, digital display advertising or landing pages for websites, as well as other channels critical to the buyer journey. Customer journey operations should bring all these teams together, even though they are all focused on the best-performing versions of their channels’ communications.

Customer journey operations should drive customers towards the channels they prefer, and lead them quickly to success, whether it is conversion, getting answers to their questions, or something else.

Data and Engineering

Data and engineering are key collaborators outside the marketing or CX team in customer journey operations. Customer journey orchestration is only as good as the data and information that your customers provide.

In order to achieve a multichannel experience, engineering teams must ensure that the systems and platforms have been connected.

You might have several teams in your organization. These could include customer experience and customer service. Although some of this will depend on the structure of your organization, it is clear that customer journey operations play a crucial role in fostering collaboration and communication between those involved in orchestration.

Dig deep: What exactly is customer journey orchestration?

Process Collaboration

Let’s now talk about collaboration. What are the requirements to create and improve existing and new processes that provide great customer experiences during the entire buyer’s journey?

Create a journey

Collaboration is essential to the process of defining customer journeys. To do it right, you need to consider:

• The customer’s mind-set
• They interact with the platforms.
• They receive communications.
• The teams within the company that are responsible for supporting the various steps of the journey.

These processes include how customers are served content, offers, and other aspects that make up an experience. They also cover what happens when they opt out of one journey or move to another.

Behind-the-scenes procedures for:

• Monitor and adjust the effectiveness of your journeys.
• Create new ones by analyzing user behavior.
• Discard components of trips that do not perform as expected.

Create content

Content creation is a process that forms part of the customer journey operations collaboration. There is content and communication at almost every stage of the journey. Even if the content is created by individual channel teams, the customer journey operations can make communications more consistent and drive towards the same goal.

It is common for existing content from campaigns and efforts specific to a particular channel to be combined and rearranged into a unified story that is orchestrated beginning-to-end. The different channels (e.g. email, social media and website) are used. It is necessary to adapt existing content, and in some cases create new content, to support a trip.

Féderation of efforts

Customer journey operations provide a central source of coordination and strategy. For it to work, there must be some federation of efforts since most of the work is performed by individual teams.

It means that the customer journey team will:

• The effort is guided by the guide.
• This tool allows you to control the creation of journeys.
• Monitor them on a global scale to identify areas of improvement.

The federated teams can also improve and adjust their specific parts to make the journey better.

Let’s say, for example, that an email which is part of the journey performs poorly. In coordination with the Customer Journey Operations team, the email marketing team will test and adjust their part of the journey to ensure it is performing at its best.

This federation allows subject matter experts optimize their channels with minimal friction, while the Customer Journey Operations team oversees the process to ensure that even small changes do not have a large impact on the journey.

Data collaboration

data is essential for creating personalized customer journeys.

Orchestration relies upon knowing what the customer has already done in order to predict what the customer is most likely to be able to do, or what their propensity will be to do, given the right motivation via offers or timing or other triggers. Collaboration around data is crucial to the success and efficiency of customer journey operations.

Here are some areas in which collaboration is essential to get the data required for orchestration.

Channel and product data siloed

Many organizations that are interested in orchestrating the customer journey have channels that are siloed. Some organizations may even have distinct product and service lines which are not connected.

The enterprise must understand the behavior and actions of the customer on multiple channels, as well as their purchasing behaviors across the entire product or service portfolio.

All of this information is therefore part of the collaborative efforts for customer journey operations. It doesn’t necessarily mean that one team is in charge of all the data, but it does mean that relevant data can be accessed by customer journey operations so that they can connect the dots between the behavioral data and conversion data that these areas provide.

Citizen data scientists

Remember that data is no longer solely the domain of data science teams. These teams are still important, but your non-technical and non-data-science team members have access to more data than before.

They are experts in the product, service, channels, or other areas. The data platform allows them to use their expertise, in conjunction with the no-code data, to work with other team members, such as data scientists or fellow citizen data scientist, to better understand data implications for customer journey orchestration.

Multi-touch attribution

The customer journey operation should be able understand what happened and make sense of it so that the journey is continually optimized. It is not sufficient to know the first or last thing that a customer will see.

Multi-touch Attribution (MTA) allows customer journey operations teams better understand the contribution of each touchpoint to the conversion or end goal. MTA can be difficult to do well, but it’s important for customer journey teams to incorporate into their planning in order to have a more accurate view of their customers.

Platform Collaboration

Platforms that enable the collaboration and personalized experience we are trying to create and optimize.

Platforms for orchestration and automation

It is a given that if you’re collaborating in customer journey , you will be using a customer journey Orchestration Platform. There may only be one orchestration platform, but this does not mean that there won’t be collaboration.

As we’ve already discussed, the purpose of an orchestration tool is to integrate individual channels in order to provide customers with a seamless experience. Your customer journey orchestration is a collaborative platform by nature. Customer journey operations are key, since this centralized tool requires collaboration between teams, data, and other channels platforms.

Individual channel platforms

We have just discussed that platforms for orchestrating customer journeys need to be able to orchestrate channels and communications. Individual channels are the answer.

The platforms used by the channel teams need to be coordinated, and feature and data integration is required to orchestrate them.

Platforms for analytics and reporting

Platforms allow our customer journey team to work together and see the areas that need improvement and the areas where they are successful. The customer journey operations team may need to work closely together with individual teams to understand how different touchpoints contribute to conversion.

CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) is a very useful measure. To do this well, you need to be able to attribute metrics at all key points in the customer journey.

To achieve the best results, the Customer Journey Operations team must foster and enable collaboration across all platforms that are used to deliver the customer experience.

Put it all together

It can be extremely difficult to implement, initiate and execute a customer journey orchestration. Collaboration must be successful on several levels. Customer journey operations include collaboration.

Next in the series of articles, we will discuss governance.

Customer journey management: Successful collaboration across people, processes and data first appeared on MarTech.