Complete Guide to Building a Customer Journey Orchestration Strategy

Customer journey orchestration is a complex tactic that involves tailoring the entire journey a customer has with a business.

While customer journey orchestration is a common acquisition tactic, today I’ll talk more about the post-sale steps that usually fall under the CS team’s purview. Before a deal lands, Sales and Marketing are primarily concerned with communication: channels, engagement tactics, messaging, tone, style, demo presentations, and CDPs.

But what happens post-sale still falls under journey orchestration – after all, a customer’s journey is just beginning at the point of sale. So, let’s explore the customer success side of the customer journey – what it means, what goes into it, its benefits, along with some examples. Later on, we’ll dive into the key components of a journey orchestration strategy, before ending on some commonly asked questions.

What Is Customer Journey Orchestration?

Customer journey orchestration is an advanced business tactic for tailoring a customer’s journey with a brand. It involves automating specific steps in the journey to fit each customer’s needs in real time based on specific triggers like product signals, account details, engagement metrics, and other custom health scores.

Thanks to recent advancements, particularly in the SaaS space, in tracking customer behavior using automation and AI, journey orchestration can now be made even more granular and targeted, helping companies grow engagement and expansion.

Unlike most traditional customer engagement strategies, customer journey orchestration (CJO) stands out as it does not typically rely on customer segmentation and user personas. Instead, journey orchestration relies on real-time data. Customer success metrics and tactics still play a significant role in this approach and may, in fact, be mandatory for post-sale CJO and can further inform marketing and sales tactics to optimize acquisition.

What Does Customer Journey Orchestration Involve?

Customer journey orchestration works by bringing together all the information you have about customers to generate insights regarding their progress, allowing you to then make micro-adjustments to their journey in real-time. It sits at the inflection point of:

1. Customer data, including: product signals, website interactions, support tickets, social engagement, and more.
2. Customer journey analytics, such as: information about key customer journey moments, customer success platform monitoring and metrics, customer outcomes, customer intent, and any other findings derived from customer data.
3. Customer communication. Typically involves engaging with customers on the appropriate channel for each interaction and personalizing messages based on customer data and insights.
4. Automation and AI. CJO couldn’t function without automation. And AI is only making automation more seamless and focused. NLP and machine learning help a great deal in understanding customer sentiment in real time and taking appropriate actions. New software solutions and features can now seamlessly turn customer insights and signals into automation flows, and then further use AI to personalize customer interactions.

Just as a conductor directs an orchestra, so too does journey orchestration conduct a customer’s journey, taking all these elements and arranging them into an optimized model for customer engagement and success.

Benefits of Journey Orchestration

Most of the benefits of customer journey orchestration are relatively straightforward. It’s easy to see value in purposefully tailoring customer journeys to be more in tune with their expectations and desires. Here’s a quick breakdown of the most important benefits:

• Fewer unnecessary handoffs between teams.
  Why it works: With CJO, most teams already know what should happen next, what falls under their purview, and their automations and customer dashboards can serve as a reminder at any point.
• Faster time-to-value for customers.
  Why it works: Onboarding flows work faster, trigger more reliably, and reduce the load on the customer success team, allowing them to focus on providing real value.
• Increased customer engagement and retention.
  Why it works: proactive automation flows trigger on health score drops or other churn precursors, providing help, notifying the lead CSM, or otherwise assisting the customer, such as by linking known fixes for their issues. Bain & Company found a simple 5% increase in retention bumps profits by up to 25% (for companies in the financial services industry).
• Clearer expansion timelines.
  Why it works: usage-based triggers launch automations that can tell CSMs the right moment to propose an upsell or a cross-sell, while also presenting important context to help them land that expansion. McKinsey reports that existing customers account for a third to half of total revenue growth, so focusing on that part of the customer journey will always be worthwhile.

Journey Mapping vs Journey Orchestration

Journey orchestration is often confused with journey mapping, as the two serve similar roles in a business. However, the mapping is typically just a prerequisite or element of customer journey orchestration. Here’s a breakdown of the differences between the two terms:

Examples of Customer Journey Orchestration

Customer journey orchestration is the methodology, but what does it actually accomplish? Simple. A tailored onboarding flow, a proactive engagement flow – those automations are textbook examples of CJO. Here are a few more:

What Are the Key Components of an Effective Customer Journey Orchestration Strategy?

1. A Clear Customer Journey Map

You can’t orchestrate a customer journey without proper guidance. And that can only happen with a good customer journey map. Consider:

1. A clear map will show the specific areas where journey orchestration can help the most.
2. A good map will also show the areas where customers need less help – sometimes in CS it’s our instinct to help as much as possible, but that can mean too much hand-holding and not enough hands-on product experience for the customers.
3. A clear map secures alignment and cooperation between multiple departments – a prerequisite for good customer success.
4. Maps can show clear communication plans and schedules. Say goodbye to on-the-fly check-ins and get ready for thoroughly planned, researched, and prepped business reviews (either quarterly or on distinct timelines.
5. A good map improves handover reliability and quality. A customer journey map will ensure handovers from Sales to Customer Success happen seamlessly and that Sales knows precisely what information CS needs to kickstart value delivery for the new account.
6. Customer journey maps also help new hires. New employees, particularly CSMs, get onboarded faster with a clear understanding of the customer journey and what they need to do at each stage.

H4: What are the 5 stages of a customer journey?

The five stages of a typical customer journey include:

1. Onboarding
2. Adoption
3. Value Realization
4. Expansion
5. Renewal

Note: I generally include expansion before renewal, as per the LAER model for customer success (see our article for more details). Expansion also has a significantly higher chance of success if CJO is implemented correctly. Recent estimates show companies grow at a median 173% higher rate when they achieve high NRR (a typical outcome of good CJO).

What are the 7 steps to map the customer journey?

Building a customer journey map has 7 simple steps:

1. Define your objectives and what success looks like to your customers.
2. Determine your customer personas based on segments, CRM and CSP data, and customer needs. Note: these only inform, rather than dictate, your customer journey orchestration strategy.
3. Map and define all customer touchpoints – when customers have contact with you throughout their journey, what that contact entails, the channels on which it happens, and the desired experience and outcomes for each stage.
4. Map customer emotions, behaviors, and stated outcomes based on the identified touchpoints.
5. Identify customer pain points and opportunities. See where customers could use more help; if resources permit, conduct a white space analysis.
6. Build a visual for your journey map. Armed with all your findings, build the actual map as a visual guide. I recommend using your preferred AI engine.
7. Validate the map with stakeholders and keep it continuously updated. The map needs to be seen and edited by CSMs with experience working directly with customers and their journeys.

Read more about how to build and improve your customer journey in our guide.

2. A Communication Plan

Communication rules are extremely important for good customer journey orchestration – regardless of whether the specific communications happen before or after the point of sale.

How you choose to communicate with customers is a very personal decision relating to your industry, expected communication behavior, and how your organization operates. To make CJO more effective, simply write down your rules and follow them. Key elements that need to be covered:

1. The communication channels you have available.
2. Your communication tone and style.
3. How personalized your messages will be.
   How automation factors into how you communicate.
4. What channels should be used for what messages, and how tone, style, and personalization can shift based on the purpose of each message.

Here’s an example:

3. Internal Alignment on Goals and Process

Cross-departmental alignment and collaboration are therefore vital, especially for CSMs, account managers, sales reps, and C-suite executives.

Alignment is therefore another key component of a good customer journey orchestration strategy. It typically splits into:

1. Determining internal goals and sharing those with the team.
2. Settling on a methodology for customer engagement and journey orchestration, including the aforementioned communication strategy.
3. Putting together a clear process for journey orchestration across the entire customer journey.
4. Setting roles, tasks, objectives, and requirements for everyone: what their role is, what they need to do, when they need to do it, what they require in order to achieve success.

4. Metrics, KPIs, and Reporting

Next, you should tie the strategy to some clear metrics and KPIs. Common journey orchestration KPIs include: CSAT, NPS, CES, and Sentiment Score, but other customer success metrics can be particularly useful depending on the goals and final methodology for your CJO process. I particularly like watching signs like Time to Value and Time to Resolution to determine how a customer’s journey is evolving.

Here’s a basic rundown of the most commonly useful metrics for customer journey orchestration:

5. Continuous Improvement and Updates

Next, as with any business process, look for ways to improve the customer journey constantly – keep an eye on metrics and make changes.

Examples of updates:

1. Reducing the number of support materials and providing manual, guided help.
   • Issue: SaaS customers receiving complex product tours have lower product usage rates.
   • Cause: customers are reaching a bottleneck when they actually transition from learning the platform to using it. Spending too much time trying to learn the product can actually harm adoption.
   • Solution: remove some of the complex tutorials and schedule more in-person meetings where the lead CSM can walk them through setup.
2. Providing immediate quick wins for new features and guiding customers towards the new value-additions.
   • Issue: newly introduced features don’t get adopted quickly enough to justify the added costs to subscriptions.
   • Cause: customers are resistant to change, don’t understand the new feature, or fail to try it out.
   • Solution: provide a clear, guided path to the first win with the new feature, all the while teaching the customer how to repeat the process.

 6. The AI and Automation Layers

Automation is already a key layer of customer journey orchestration. It helps teams anticipate customer issues, act faster when issues do happen, and direct specific actions to happen at the right time (such as triggering playbooks, creating tasks, sending emails, and more).

Recently, AI has added to these capabilities, expanding the range of what’s possible thanks to natural language processing, automatic customer sentiment scoring, churn risk calculations, and more. AI agents can now cover most of the customer journey and can directly trigger or suggest actions.

For your CJO strategy, think about how all the layers work together: automation, AI, and your CSMs. Lastly, consider what customer success platform features would be most helpful and ensure you have them in your arsenal.

Below is a simple breakdown of how signals can be linked to actions and to specific CSP features.

Frequently Asked Questions about Customer Journey Orchestration

1. How do real-time analytics enhance dynamic customer journey adjustments?

Real-time analytics sit at the core of a customer journey orchestration strategy. They enable timely, context-aware adjustments in the customer journey. The simplest way to take advantage of real-time analytics is by setting up your customer success platform to capture real-time signals and immediately trigger emails, tasks, Slack messages, playbooks, or agentic AI actions.

2. What is customer journey orchestration software?

Customer journey orchestration can be handled by multiple software platforms depending on the stages of the journey that need to be serviced.

1. Customer journey orchestration platforms tailored for marketing purposes: platforms such as Braze, Pega, Optimove, and Adobe’s Journey Orchestration work well for the pre-sales stages of the customer journey and for aiding customer support post-sale, but fall short of true value optimization and delivery, specifically when it comes to SaaS scenarios.
2. Customer success platforms, such as Custify, are ideal for optimizing the later customer journey stages. CSPs rely on real-time customer data and analytics, surfacing churn and sentiment scores to help companies stay on top of customer needs and consistently optimize value delivery. CSPs are even more useful since the automation and AI layer is already built into such platforms.

3. How do you create an effective customer journey orchestration strategy?

Putting together a customer journey orchestration strategy involves understanding your customer’s goals, aligning with your team, clearly developing a communication plan, setting KPIs and metrics, and consistently monitoring customer signals and updating the journey orchestration strategy accordingly.

More detailed information can be found in the body of the article. For a quick review of the necessary steps, here’s a quick checklist:

4. What happens when expansion and churn signals fire together?

If a customer shows both signs of churn and expansion, it means they’re showing conflicting patterns of behavior. The best thing to do, from a customer journey orchestration perspective, is to ensure nothing is sent out to the customer automatically and that CSMs always have the final say on what happens at this stage.

This is a critical moment for these specific types of customers: they’re both considering leaving and debating expanding their usage at the same time. This type of customer is also called a “split account” or “mixed account.”
So what can you do? Split accounts should always trigger in-depth, manual investigations (can be aided by AI). Lead CSMs must:

1. Step in to block any actions from being taken before you have the full picture.
2. Prevent any internal confusion and ensure everyone understands what’s happening with the account.
3. Pause any expansion conversations – a customer that’s about to churn doesn’t want to be upsold to, even if they actually do need and may have been looking for additional features, seats, add-ons, etc.
4. Review your stakeholder map. In Custify, you can check stakeholders automatically from the 360 view. Identify who’s who and what their decision power is, and clarify whether churn and expansion signals were coming from distinct entities in the customers’ organization.
5. Deep-dive on health metrics. For the actual investigation, look at all the health scores that have been tracked over time. Ask for an account review from your AI agent and make sure the context is clear: this customer shows both signs of churn and expansion. Review results, do a manual review of recent conversations and touch points, and run conclusions by any relevant teammates that might be able to provide more context.
6. Define a plan of action. What do you actually do now? Reach out? Hold a business review meeting? Fix stalled tickets? Decide the best plan of action together with Sales, Product, and loop in C-suite executives.

5. What are common mistakes in journey orchestration?

Some clear, common mistakes when building a customer journey orchestration (CJO) strategy include:

1. Forcing customers down rigid, linear paths. Working with customer segments is a learned behavior, thus, CJO can quickly devolve back into very rigid customer segments, which are usually contrary to the journey orchestration principles of automating journeys and touchpoints based on granular, hyperspecific criteria.
   Solution: build advanced automations around granular, individual signals instead of broad customer personas / segments.
2. Not assigning owners. Most of the complex processes that are part of CJO need owners to prevent bottlenecks and guarantee value delivery and smooth transitions between the pre- and post-sale stages.
   Solution: assigning owners as part of the journey orchestration strategy.
3. Data hygiene and automation issues. Siloed data, disconnected customer communication channels, broken automations, and lack of KPIs or clear metrics all point to poor data hygiene as the core issue.
   Solution: ensure a single source of truth for customer data and set clear KPIs at the beginning of the CJO strategy.
4. Internal alignment issues. Lack of proper alignment, validation, and collaboration between teams can make the journey orchestration process feel unrealistic and difficult to apply. This forces teams to rely on assumptions instead of checking in with customers or with other members of the team.
   Solution: build in alignment as a key part of the orchestration strategy, not an afterthought.

Building a Customer Journey Orchestration Strategy Using Custify

When building a customer journey orchestration, a single source of customer truth is the simplest way to prevent automation and visibility issues. Add automation, AI agents, and complex calculated metrics, and you get Custify – an advanced, AI-enabled customer success platform that can serve as your central hub for all things CJO.

In Custify, you can:

1. Build complex automations that trigger based on customer churn signals, AI sentiment signals, custom metrics, and lifecycle stages.
2. Train Custify AI based on your existing CS processes and documentation, and quickly set up the platform to meet your specific needs.
3. Analyze your customer portfolio with our extensive suite of AI agents and highlight any areas where you can adjust the customer journey to better serve customer outcomes.

Reach out to our team today for a quick, 15-minute call for more details on how Custify can “conduct” your journey orchestration strategy.