A stellar customer experience can require a lot of pieces to be in place that span the internal-facing and external-facing parts of your organization.
Customer journey orchestration allows marketers to integrate different marketing technology systems and platforms together. For instance, you can tie together your social media advertising, your website, your email marketing and your
customer relationship management system
or customer database. This means you can share information between them that helps each platform take the best actions based on the specific customer or their last actions.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can provide additional benefits. By creating a machine learning model, you can observe and learn what customer interactions and behaviors create the most valuable customers. For instance, if you’re able to observe and measure how customers behave when traveling between marketing platforms, and how they respond to different messaging using A/B testing, you can then learn how to optimize pathways. AI helps you automate this and show the best messages to the right customers and more. AI also can allow you to improve your results each time a user goes through the journey because your system gets better and learns what works (and what doesn’t) each time.
In my experience working with several clients to create customer journey orchestration strategies that involve AI and machine learning components, I’ve found that it’s best to start initiatives like this with a pilot project. Why a pilot project instead of a full-blown implementation? It minimizes risk and cost by getting you quicker results.
Determine Your Goals
As with any initiative, it’s critical for all involved to have a clear understanding of expectations and measures of success. Start with the big goals of how you want to measure the value of customers and the customer experience, and then drill down to something more specific and immediately actionable. It may be best to start with a smaller series of actions that can then be turned into your pilot project.
For instance, your overall goals might be to sell a product such as watches or clothing across a wide variety of marketing channels and then turn those customers into referrers and repeat buyers. While this is the ultimate goal, consider basing your pilot project on something more focused, such as increasing the number of product views from social media advertising.
Choose The Right Tools
To implement your pilot project, put the right tools in place. There are several customer journey orchestration tools available, including Kitewheel, Salesforce Journey Builder and Acquia Journey (Full disclosure: My agency is a sales partner of Acquia), and you may want to evaluate several before picking one. In my experience, the best choice comes down to a combination of its flexibility, price and the technical knowledge level of those who will need to implement it.
For the AI component of this, you’ll likely need to rely on either an in-house data science team or an external consultant to write an application that’s able to take in data from your marketing channels and then assign a score to each interaction. For instance, a customer who goes from a Facebook ad and views three products on your website might get a score of 10, while a customer who only views one product on your website might get a score of five. After you get enough data, you’ll be able to start seeing which messages are most effective and which audiences include the most valuable customers.
Start Your Pilot Project
At this point, you’ve defined your goals and identified or developed the tools you’ll use to create your pilot project. Now it’s time to connect the dots. Connect your customer journey orchestration tool via its application programming interface to your marketing platforms, which for the purpose of your pilot project might include a social media advertising platform such as Facebook, your website and your analytics tools.
Then, define the parameters you want to test and learn more about. I suggest using two dimensions: different messaging variations that can be tested via A/B testing, and different audience segments, which can be determined based on your target audience. For instance, you might want to test different messaging with different age groups or perhaps based on people who live in urban versus suburban locations.
In addition, connect your AI application to all of your marketing platforms so that you can measure and analyze what’s happening and learn over time which messaging and approach works best. Once your customer journey orchestration tool, your AI application and your marketing platforms are connected, you’re ready to run the pilot.
Test, Analyze And Plan To Expand
What you learn from your pilot project can be a phenomenal way to determine what your next steps should be. Some questions to ask as you test and analyze are the following:
• Did you meet the goals you set for the project?
• Are there any gaps in your internal team that would be helpful to consider next time?
• What resources would be required to scale your pilot project enterprisewide?
• Is it worth investing more in this project, or is there another area or application that might be a better fit?
In the case of your pilot project, by connecting your customer journey orchestration tool with your marketing technology platforms and analytics tools, you’ll be able to see how it’s performing in several different dimensions. Ultimately, if the goal of your pilot project is to get more product views, you can see whether there was an uptick in views and what messages caused that increase.
Your pilot can be expanded to include additional marketing channels or extended deeper into the funnel to include product sales and more. The important thing is to expand in a methodical way so that you’re able to truly understand the data.
Using AI and customer journey orchestration together can bring tremendous benefits to your organization. By improving the communication between your marketing platforms, and showing you the best ways to reach your customers, this combination can optimize your efforts and create a more valuable customer experience.