The CX Files—2021: The Year of Journey Orchestration

By leveraging the power of technology, data, and process, marketers are now able to deliver personalized, omnichannel experiences that keep customers engaged at every stage in the funnel.

Consumers have long told us that they want brands not only to understand who they are but also to personalize their experiences, and numerous studies have shown they reward brands that do so. It’s only in the past several years, however, that marketing technology (MarTech) has matured to the point in which it’s feasible to deploy true personalization at scale.

Journey orchestration is enabled by a matrix of technology, data, and processes that allows marketers to deliver personalized content based on a user’s unique brand interaction.

To deliver a personal, one-to-one customer journey, brands must leverage next-generation data management that results in an unprecedented understanding of their customer, and best-in-class capabilities that enable customer-first, cross-channel orchestration.

‘Journey orchestration’ refers to the ability to deliver an in-the-moment, personalized experience to consumers across channels. Journey orchestration — in itself a combination of technology, data, and process — informs and drives decisions based on consumer behavior, context, and profile, supporting the creation and activation of relevant experiences for a consumer as engagement happens.

With the ability to capture, store, and segment customer data, brands can meet customers where they’re at and deliver personalized experiences across the the entire customer lifecycle.

It’s not a stretch to say future-state customer experience will be powered by human-centered design, sophisticated data engineering, rich customer profiles, and clever orchestration. By harnessing today’s complex MarTech environment, and building the appropriate supporting organizational structures, brands will provide a tailored experience to help people find meaningful information, make decisions, and act.​

For those of us involved in marketing, while the technology has finally caught up to the promise of creating a personalized omnichannel experience, if anything the past year has illuminated that “omnichannel” wasn’t really about setting up new channels or spinning up new tools — it was about customer centricity and giving consumers easy, frictionless ways to engage with your brand. Full stop.

With the rapid pace of change in marketing technology and ever-shifting consumer expectations, it can be hard to keep up with the latest trends. The CX Files was created to report out what the leader of Slalom’s Global Experience Team, Rio Longacre, is seeing from the field.

Rio Longacre is an executive with two decades of leadership and experience in the digital space across strategy consulting, technology services, data, and media planning. He’s a frequent thought leader and subject matter expert in customer experience management, digital business transformation and marketing/advertising technology. Reach him at riol@slalom.com.

Slalom Customer Insight is created by industry leaders and practitioners from Slalom, a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation.