In our modern world, so many companies are fighting for our attention. Google processes billions of searches every day. Instagram has 2 billion active monthly users with the most active brands posting 17 stories per month.  

With so many brands fighting for your audience’s attention, not only does your marketing team have to focus on telling a compelling story, but you must ensure your processes are flexible and measurable so you can make changes on the fly to maintain mindshare. If you don’t provide unique-enough experiences that stand above the noise, you risk losing some of your audience to competitors.

As we’ve been discussing in our recent articles, “How to Craft a Successful Experience-Focused Strategy,” and “Top 4 Tips for Ensuring Your Tech Stack Fulfills Your Marketing Strategy,” weaving your strategy and platform capabilities together is key to maturing your operations and orchestrating great customer experiences.  

In this article, we’ll continue our analysis of how experienced-focused strategies and maturing your operations build towards creating successful customer experiences, examine what successful experience orchestration looks like, and provide tips on how you can start your own experience orchestration initiative.

The Expectation for Great Experiences Continue to Grow

Marketers are expected to deliver unique experiences that are tailored to their audience’s preferences and needs. But how do you do that beyond basic segmentation and custom journeys? The fact is that, throughout the 2010s, great experiences have come about from companies moving from being technology-enabled to technology-led. With the introduction of the smartphone and the adoption of streaming services, consumers are used to having “always-on” services that provide them with what they want whenever they want it.  

These services are not only providing instant access to content, but they are also continuing to provide highly personalized experiences. Netflix, YouTube, and other entertainment companies are always analyzing what their viewers are watching and what they are interested in to provide them dynamic recommendations on what to watch next. This growth in expectations is slowly making its way to more traditional industries, such as healthcare and banking, forcing marketing teams throughout these organizations to provide more personalized services to consumers.

Unfortunately, many marketers in these industries struggle to capitalize on these evolving expectations because they are constantly fighting against:

• Ineffective tools and technologies
• Informational and decision-making silos that make data unactionable
• Reporting limitations that often make measuring ROI and attribution highly unlikely

These inefficiencies make it difficult to digitally transform their operations, and as a result, slows the process of attracting and retaining customers. If you find yourself and your team in a similar situation, you are not alone. Many of our clients come to us looking for opportunities to take their marketing operations and customer experience to the next level.  

What is Experience Orchestration?

Crafting brilliant, personalized customer experiences requires orchestration across your entire MarTech stack and organization. Experience Orchestration is all about driving more impactful campaigns at scale by involving the right team with the right vision to enable the right strategy and experiences that resonate with your customers.

To do that, you must tie your strategy, technology, and data together to break down silos within your operations, ensure your data is actionable so you can examine what rings true with your audience, and exceed your audiences’ expectations through personalization.

How an Experience Orchestration Initiative Can Level Up Your Customer Experience

An experience orchestration initiative analyzes the experience your customers have throughout their lifecycle.

To Get More Granular, An Experience Orchestration Initiative Examines:

The Strategy That Will Enable You to Win In Your Industry

Your organization must commit to adopting a data-backed mindset of examining how your customers interact with your brand, products, and services. Envision the type of experience you want to deliver to your customers. One that exceeds their expectations and fills them with joy whenever they interact with your brand. If there’s any strategic, technological, and internal process roadblocks preventing you from delivering that ideal strategy, then you must begin to analyze how you can eliminate them.  

For example, if you do not have a single source of truth for all your marketing and customer data, how can you expect to truly measure your campaign ROI and the impact they have on your customers?

Technological Inefficiencies That Prevent Optimization of the Customer Experience

A useful exercise is mapping your technological inefficiencies or roadblocks alongside every customer touchpoint. Performing this exercise with a marketing tech and operations expert can help you understand what tools and processes need to be replaced or optimized. This way, you can ensure your customer experience is frictionless, improve satisfaction, and discover new ways to personalize each customers’ journeys.

The Data You'll Need to Segment Customers and Craft Custom Journeys

When your customer and marketing data is siloed across a number of desperate sources, your data is simply not actionable. Establishing a customer data platform (CDP) is a first great step to begin to view your data holistically and activate it downstream throughout your MarTech platform. Seeing the response to your campaigns empowers you to continually test and refine your strategy.

How Activating Customer Data Downstream Empowers Dynamic Personalization

Implementing unified customer profiles using a CDP opens a whole new world of personalization opportunities. You can begin to personalize based on demographics, purchasing information, browsing history from your website, and more. Using these customer and commercial intelligence, you can begin to identify what content customers are responding to and marry your content and messaging with custom journeys. This way you can ensure your messaging resonates with your audience.  

How Adopting a Data Science Mindset Enables You to Continually Improve Strategy and Tech

After orchestrating the initial framework of your new customer experience strategy, refinement overtime is incredibly important. Always consider using your campaign and customer data to optimize your messaging and processes to weed out inefficiencies and drive new automations that empower you to focus on strategic initiatives that grow your marketing operations.

How a Continual Focus on Innovation Enables You Refine Your Customer Experience

Those who fail to innovate are at risk of losing their audience. With new technologies, such as machine learning and generative AI, you can find new methods to personalize your customer journeys and messaging to enable the right strategies and experiences needed to win in your industry.

Best Practices for Starting Your Own Experience Orchestration Initiative

Experience orchestration is a team sport; to orchestrate the experience that wows your customers, you need to have everyone in your organization on board. Buy-in must occur from the top down; if not, your experience-focused strategies are at risk of fizzling out before they reach their full potential.

How to Increase Buy-In for Your Experience Orchestration Initiative

1. Have a clear vision. Gaining buy-in will be difficult if you can’t formulate a clear vision for the initiative. You want to ensure you paint a picture of what the end-state of the initiative will achieve. Make sure it:

• Defines the problem with your current experience: Describe your strategies and tech’s current roadblocks and how it is causing friction within the customer experience
• Details how the new experience you are seeking to deliver will impact overall ROI and improve customer satisfaction and retention
• Convey the risks your organization may incur if they stick with the status quo

2. Tailor your pitch to your audience. At the end of the day, most internal team members are going to care about how delivering a more dynamic, personalized customer experience will affect their day-to-day work. Focusing on how to accomplish the goals of this experience orchestration initiative will reduce the time they need to spend on tedious tasks and make for happier prospects and customers.

3. Be prepared to compromise. The fact is what makes a customer experience excellent is often subjective. Your vision of an ideal customer experience is going to look different compared to others. What matters most is having everyone working towards the same goals to help you deliver a more seamless experience.

4. Meet regularly with key stakeholders and expect continual iteration. The market is ever changing, and as a result, so are customers’ expectations. Once you are delivering the experience you’ve envisioned, expect the journey to have just begun. Meet regularly with key members of your sales, client success, service, and IT teams to ensure that systems and processes are working together efficiently as well as uncover new ways to improve and customize the customer experience.  

Since your customers’ expectations are ever evolving, so should your experience. When crafting new strategies, journeys, campaigns, and marketing materials, always cycle through the following steps:

1. Research what your customers expect from your brand experience

2. Break down existing roadblocks and silos that develop throughout the marketing, sales, client success, and service experiences

3. Ensure your tech and processes enhance every customer touchpoint

4. Continually ask your customers for feedback

With these best practices in mind, you’ll be well on your way to designing a customer experience that will wow your audience!

Looking for a partner who can help you to take the next step and digitally transform your operations? Reach out to us to discover how we can help you deliver an out-of-this-world customer experience!

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