The Marketer’s Guide to Customer Journey Orchestration
The Current State of Customer Experience
In an ecosystem that is in perpetual flux, Customer Journey Orchestration (CJO) marks a new stage in the evolution of retail.
Dubbed the gamechanger in elevating the customer experience (CX), it has caught the industry by storm and continues to be the focus of conversation among marketers and retailers.
Yet, for all the interest it has sparked over the past few years, it is a topic that throws marketers off balance because it is often confused with related terms and tools.
So, what exactly is Customer Journey Orchestration? Why is it fundamental to improving the customer experience? How does it work and integrate into existing infrastructure? More importantly, how do you choose a Customer Journey Orchestration platform that works for you?
These are just some of the questions we will explore in this guide.
Buckle in as we deep dive into the what, why, and how of Customer Journey Orchestration.
What is Customer Journey Orchestration?
Before we set out to define and understand CJO in its entirety, let’s first explore the current CX landscape that makes it a necessity.
Let’s face it, there will never come a time where the customer experience will conform to a set standard. It has, is, and forever will be in a state of constant evolution catalyzed by the customer’s changing behavior, advances in technology, and the aftermath of the global pandemic.
That said, it comes as no surprise that customer expectations have risen.
As a marketer, it falls on you to understand and bridge the divide between the customer’s expectation and the experience delivered.
Yet, this is where most brands fail to meet the mark.
According to Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Brendan Witcher, there is a huge gap between how brands think they are doing and the reality from their customers’ perspectives. A report by Forrester sheds light on this growing disparity. It finds while 89% of the brands claim they are investing in personalization to revamp the customer experience, only 40% of the customers say the information they get from brands is relevant to their tastes and interests.
But, why do these gaps exist? And, how can marketers proactively bridge this divide?
Let’s dive in.
In a time before the journey was central to the customer experience, marketers viewed the customer through the lens of business objectives. Interactions were manufactured with the singular intent of educating customers about products. Marketers aligned these interactions with events such as product launches. These interactions were linear, generic, and restricted to a handful of channels that marketers predetermined.
The dawn of the digital age marked a shift in this paradigm.
Technology has revolutionized communication and reshaped the way customers experience a brand. The steady incline in digital disruptions has birthed a plethora of digital avenues where customers explore, experience, and engage with a brand before making a final decision.
This increase in touchpoints between a customer and brand has recalibrated the customer journey and redefined the shopping experience.
Customers no longer perceive or limit their expeditions at brick-and-mortar stores as ‘shopping’. The lines have now blurred to include a matrix of channels.
Empowered by these advances, customers now demand to be met in moments where and when it matters the most to them.
Now, more than ever, to thrive in a highly competitive and crowded industry, marketers must be present, listen, and engage with customers on their turf. The need of the hour is seamless and consistent experiences that add value to the customer, where and when they require it.
Thus, the traditional linear monologue has been replaced with dynamic and real-time interactions between the brand and customer across channels, both online and offline.
This brings us to a pivotal question – how do you meet your customer in real-time where and when it matters the most to them? How do you interpret, anticipate, and orchestrate a dynamic and consistent experience before, during, and after a purchase?
The answer is Customer Journey Orchestration.
The Defining Pillars of Customer Journey Orchestration
The Difference Between CJO, Marketing Automation, CJM, and RTIM
1 Customer Journey Orchestration vs. Customer Journey Management
Customer Journey Management is the process of determining what information a customer needs to achieve a set goal. It relies on predefined segments to create a consensus on what action is required to motivate a customer from one stage to another.
Think of it as a funnel. Customer Journey Management provides predictive analysis on the best course of action to move the customer along their journey.
Customer Journey Orchestration, on the other hand, looks at the customer as an individual. It stitches together every interaction a customer has had and continues to have with the brand to create a holistic 360-degree view of the customer. This data is gathered and analyzed in real-time to help make intelligent decisions to enhance the customer experience at each touchpoint.
While customer journey management provides the best response, Customer Journey Orchestration puts that action into effect.
2 Customer Journey Orchestration vs. Marketing Campaign Automation
Marketing campaign automation is an element of Customer Journey Orchestration. It features campaign-focused functions that automate monotonous and repetitive responses in interactions between a customer and brand. This includes email marketing and social media posting.
Customer Journey Orchestration takes on a more holistic and nuanced approach in comparison. It is journey-focused and comprises setting up a series of campaigns across the journey. This includes management, analytics, and optimization geared towards guiding customers along the various touchpoints.
3 Customer Journey Orchestration vs. Customer Journey Mapping
4 Customer Journey Orchestration vs. Real-Time Interaction Management (RTIM)
RTIM is an ‘in-the-moment’ decision engine that delivers appropriate content across channels and touchpoints. Though similar to CJO, the lines blur when it comes to its core function. The focus of RTIM is to improve business results, and every action is geared towards achieving its purpose.
Customer Journey Orchestration, on the other hand, gathers, analyzes, and orchestrates customer journeys in real-time to improve the customer experience. It is a customer-led function that aims to create value in each interaction.
5 Step 1: Audience Activation for Journeys
By integrating the CJO tool with a Customer Data Platform, CJO can activate the audience in real-time for engagement orchestration. CDP stitches customer data together to create a dynamic 360-degree view of the customer. CJO leverages this real-time view of the audience to understand contextual information and address customer intent.
6 Step 2: Journey Orchestration
CJO provides an interface to create automated journeys based on certain patterns. Marketers could also create custom journeys based on business needs. Journeys could be trigger-based or event-based.
When a shopper abandons a cart, an automated journey gets triggered to communicate with the customer with a certain message on a certain channel to entice the shopper to complete the transaction. This is an example of a trigger-based journey. While event-based journeys are communications sent on a customer’s birthday or appointment reminders.
A CJO automates such repetitive tasks and ensures the delivery of contextual, journey-based experiences at any point or time.
Using connectors, CJO integrates into various channels, such as email, SMS, mobile app, eCommerce site, POS, social media, and WhatsApp to deliver the next best action, and create connected and consistent experiences across the customer journey.
7 Step 3: Testing and Optimization
Leveraging AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics capabilities, CJO tests and optimizes every interaction to improve the customer experience along the journey.
Campaigns are A/B tested to assess the effectiveness of messages, custom offers, and content of every interaction. CJO can run tests on multiple variants of each message before publication to determine the best course of action. This is optimized at each interaction to systematically improve each message and experience, thereby enhancing the overall marketing ROI.
8 Step 4: Journey Analytics
9 Email Personalization at Open Time
10 Real-time Offer Personalization
11 AI-based Guided Selling for Call Center Agents
12 Real-time Personalization at POS
13 Real-time Intervention at Cart Abandonment

When integrated, marketers can leverage streaming transaction data on CDP to trigger automated journeys for customers in real-time.
For example, if a customer adds an item to cart but does not check out, a cart abandonment journey workflow is triggered automatically by CJO. This puts into motion a series of notifications at intervals reminding the customer of the abandoned cart.
Further, to motivate the customer to follow through on their intent, CJO can orchestrate customized offers on items in the cart.
14 Creating Omnichannel Engagement
16 Enhanced End-to-End Customer Experience
With the standard of customer experience evolving at a rapid pace, a robust CJO enables marketers to adapt, adopt, and thrive amid these changes.
Customers enter, engage, exit, and re-engage with a brand at various touchpoints spread across multiple channels and devices. Serving as the operational and execution hub, CJO draws from its comprehensive view of the customer to provide predictive and proactive actionable insights to enact the best response in every interaction.
CJO’s omnichannel experience facilitates a seamless and consistent experience so customers can pick up where they left off in their pathway to conversion at their preferred channel and moment.
17 Customer Engagement at Scale
18 Increased Revenue
19 Enhanced Productivity
A robust CJO connects all the pieces of the puzzle, or, in this case, tools and technology across an organization, together to form a cohesive structure and process. By doing this, it eliminates data silos to improve cross-departmental functions. This greatly improves productivity across the organization.
Further, an AI and ML-powered Customer Journey Orchestration automates repetitive tasks which reduces the need for human intervention while maintaining accuracy. While intelligent decisioning enables faster, accurate, and effective insight-driven actions.
This enables the CJO to perform once manual and cumbersome tasks independently in a matter of seconds. For example, creating and sharing custom offers based on the customer’s journey.
20 Improved Customer Lifetime Value
Consistency is key to unlocking a seamless and exceptional customer experience. However, data silos, incomplete data sets, and a dearth of historical, behavioral, and contextual data can serve as hurdles to creating these memorable experiences.
CJO remedies these challenges by integrating with a CDP to stitch together a comprehensive and holistic view of the customer. This data is leveraged, analyzed, and synthesized into actionable insights that are predictive and proactive.
This is put into action by the CJO to engage with customers along each phase of the customer lifecycle, right from acquisition (campaign awareness), growth (cross-sell campaigns), to retention (offers and loyalty programs).
CJO offers customers a unique and evolving CX. One that is tailored to their journey. This provides marketers with a competitive advantage as customers are more likely to transact with a brand that makes them feel seen and heard, leading to increased acquisition, sales, retention, and CLTV.
The changing retail landscape and growing need to provide customers with a consistent and personalized experience across channels have led to a surge in the global journey analytics market.
With the market slated to reach $46.68 million by 2030, marketers have quickly realized the importance of incorporating Customer Journey Orchestration into their MarTech stack.
But how do you go about choosing a CJO that works for you?
Here are 6 things to bear in mind when considering a CJO for your business:
22 Seamless Integration
Think of CJO as a jigsaw puzzle consisting of interlocking pieces. While many of the available solutions feature pieces that seamlessly connect to form a cohesive process, there are some that were built with no foresight, and therefore cannot integrate into many MarTech stacks and legacy systems.
Further, some orchestration tools support integration with a limited number of channels which can prove troublesome in the long run. When considering a CJO, ensure that it is future-proof, adaptable, and scalable.
23 Journey-centric
A CJO cannot claim to be customer-led if it is not journey-centric. While many tools do boast of being capable of engaging with customers across channels, unless it provides marketers with a holistic view of the customer and their journey in real-time, it will remain a traditional campaign-driven approach.
When assessing a CJO, ensure that it consists of Journey Analytics, Journey Orchestration, and AI and ML capabilities. When combined, this must translate into a tool that studies the customer in real-time to provide insights that can be put into action to deliver exceptional experiences.
24 Real-time, Cross-channel Decisioning
Customers want to be met where and when they want. To meet this expectation, a CJO tool must be able to analyze, visualize, and orchestrate the next best action to an interaction in real-time.
To do so, AI-driven intelligent decisioning is a critical feature. Building on this, a CJO must allow for conversations across channels where the customer interacts along their journey.
25 Customer Journey Visualization
A key feature of CJO is understanding beforehand where the ‘hot spots’ and ‘bottlenecks’ are along a customer’s journey. Knowing this helps marketers proactively resolve issues to facilitate a seamless customer experience along the journey.
When in the market for a CJO, ensure that the tool comes equipped with robust Journey Analytics capabilities to provide marketers with deep insights on the customer’s journey from every minute detail of the customer to broader trends at scale.
26 Connect to Offline and Online Data Sources
To work as it should, a CJO must connect to multiple data sources across online and offline channels. These fragments of data are stitched together to create a comprehensive customer profile. This is critical to orchestrating value-driven journeys.
However, to perform this function, a CJO must be integrated with a robust CDP. When considering a CJO, check to see if it comes natively integrated with a CDP, or if this will need to fit into your existing stack.
Should this be the other way around, test to see that the tool is able to harmoniously integrate and access a wide range of data sources. Any limitation in the data sources will likely limit journey orchestration capabilities.
27 Data Compliance
Data is an immeasurable resource. Though pivotal to a CJO in orchestrating contextual and value-driven journeys, managing and operating data within the guidelines of privacy regulations can prove challenging.
When determining if a CJO is a right fit for you and your organization, consider the processes it has in place to regulate data, privacy, and security in accordance with globally recognized standards. Review the company’s accreditations to ensure that they are certified and compliant.
Success stories
Algonomy’s Customer Journey Orchestration (CJO) is a specialized solution built for retail and consumer businesses. It leverages machine learning algorithms, advanced analytics, and micro-segmentation tools to automatically orchestrate, test, and optimize personalized campaigns to offer an end-to-end flow of tailored customer experiences.
What’s more, the CJO can seamlessly integrate with Algonomy’s Real-time Customer Data Platform (CDP), empowering marketers with real-time audience activation capabilities in conjunction with customer analytics, campaign orchestration, and journey optimization capabilities. This allows for a more holistic approach to personalization and 1:1 engagement.
Algonomy Campaign
What Sets Algonomy’s CJO Apart?
Retail Demand Forecasting With Algonomy – How Can We Help?
US Supermarket Chain Achieves 3X Incremental Sales and 2X Digital Adoption with Personalized Marketing and Automation
Leading Canadian-based Pizza Franchise Sees an 8% Increase in Overall Sales
Leading Multinational Conglomerate Tackles Data Silos and Missed Cross-sell and Up-sell Opportunities
The Future is Dynamic Journey Orchestration
To thrive in today’s highly competitive retail industry, marketers must deliver individualized experiences in every interaction that go above and beyond expectations. According to McKinsey, 71% of customers expect companies to deliver personalized interaction. Therefore, Customer Journey Orchestration is no longer an option but a strategic imperative.
Algonomy’s CJO can help you reimagine your approach to customer experience with hyper-personalized omnichannel journeys.





