In engaging customers today, we need to be heard above the noise, and we need to deliver creativity and uniqueness to each customer in the moments that matter. Customers are looking for value and for companies to address their needs on their terms. Companies now can start with a deep understanding of their customers and then act on this information to engage them and make them feel like they have a one-to-one relationship with the company. This approach is going from competitive advantage to expectation. The old segment-based approach to marketing automation is no longer adequate. In today’s marketing world, we need event-triggered communications to engage customers with personalized experiences. This extends well beyond traditional marketing practices and permeates deeper into your company beyond marketing teams.
After months of anticipation, we are thrilled to announce that the new real-time customer journey orchestration capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing are now generally available to all businesses, beginning in select regions and rolling out worldwide in the months ahead.
Dynamics 365 Marketing is transforming the way both marketers and business users alike can elevate customer experiences, win customers, and earn their loyalty faster through personalized, real-time, customer-led interactions, all on a unified adaptable platform by making every interaction count.
“Creating an enterprise-wide common conversation that meets customers in their exact moment of need is core to a successful growth strategy. This is exactly what makes Customer Journey Orchestration in Dynamics 365 Marketing a compelling and important addition to the Dynamics suite. It is an intuitive solution to one of CX’s greatest challenges: learning from signals and responding beyond expectations,” —Liz Miller, Vice President and Principal Analyst of Constellation Research.
And Dynamics 365 Marketing experiences get even better as you also use Microsoft’s customer data platform, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights makes it easy to unify customer data, augment profiles, and identify high-value customer segments. You can use profile and segment data in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to fine-tune your targeting and further refine your journeys to drive meaningful interactions.
We’ve partnered with Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst, Rusty Warner, to create a webinar titled Customer Journey Orchestration: Make Every Interaction Count to frame this modern marketing landscape. It’s a must-see overview that lays the foundation to understanding changing customer expectations and how marketing technology must evolve to meet these needs.
We have several customers that are already using these capabilities to elevate experiences for their customers and transform their businesses. Here are some of their stories.
Starting with a deep understanding leveraging the power of data and AI
The European Forum Alpbach (EFA) is a platform that drives ideas for an empowered and democratic Europe. It brings together young people, leading scholars, thinkers, scientists, policymakers, business people, and civil society actors from Europe and from all over the world to engage and contribute to its mission of shaping a stronger Europe. EFA is an incubator of ideas and an initiator of action for the European continent.
Like many organizations, disconnected tools and processes inhibited EFA from interacting with members along the customer journeys they had envisioned. By using Dynamics 365 Marketing customer journey orchestration EFA was able to bridge the gap between their onsite and online customer experiences by pulling together those unconnected systems (i.e. CRM, payments, registrations, etc.) to create a complete end-to-end experience for their members.
“It’s fairly simple with this tool where we can trigger the communication to the user based on the actions they are taking such as processing a payment. We get data from different sources and based on this data, we can trigger actions in real-time. This is something that we couldn’t do before.” —Mario Nurderscher, CRM Architect & Development Partner, European Forum Alpbach.
Using real-time event triggers and AI-powered channel optimization, EFA was able to orchestrate and automate ticket purchasing for their members. When a member purchases a ticket, a journey is triggered that orchestrates that member’s experience, including confirmation emails, real-time updates, and offers during the conference, etc. It was easy to create one journey with individual outcomes based on the actions of each member.
Triggering journeys based on events to respond in moments that matter
Leatherman, the originator and category leader in high-quality multi-tools, pocket tools, and knives, sought a solution to meet their growing D2C (Direct to Consumer) communication needs. With the objective to curate a more personalized customer journey and to create user experience continuity with their online store, Leatherman leveraged Dynamics 365 Marketing customer journey orchestration to deliver an end-to-end welcome journey for their new customers.
“[the Journey designer] is straightforward and easy to use, with an intuitive workflow layout. We have flexibility to trigger our journeys in multiple ways from our website and our other Dynamics products, and products from other vendors. The journey can also react to customer activities in real-time.” —Liz Lee, IT Director, Leatherman Tool Group.
Using customer journey orchestration and Power Automate, the team at Leatherman was able to create a multi-touchpoint journey which allowed them to engage their customers across their commerce and marketing solutions using real-time custom events. This journey was executed every time a customer signed up or started to check out on their website. This allowed Leatherman to seamlessly activate new customers and to create opportunities for continued engagement along the way.
Hyper personalizing communications at scale to drive better outcomes
“When I first heard about CJO, I immediately thought about the potential efficiencies the product would offer. To say that I was exhilarated, would be an understatement. CJO in Dynamics 365 has allowed me to build significantly fewer segments and has automated deployments that used to take my team and I hours to do. Instead now, I get to spend that time focusing on what matters; mentoring volunteer leaders and getting our volunteers into the field.”—Dustin Lynch, Team Rubicon Sr. Associate, Operations Support Mobilization.
Team Rubicon is a veteran-led disaster response organization that serves communities before, during, and after disasters and humanitarian crises by mobilizing their network of nearly 150,000 volunteers who largely consist of first responders and veterans. In addition to responding to natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes, Team Rubicon has been leading vaccination efforts to help combat the COVID-19 crises.
The impact that nonprofit Team Rubicon has made in hundreds of disaster relief operations is life-changing for the people and communities they serve. The Microsoft stack and Dynamics 365 are at the core of their operations, and over the past three years, they have continued to innovate tech to support, scale, and drive their missions. Their latest tech innovation comes from the work they’re doing with Dynamics 365 Marketing customer journey orchestration.
“The ability to communicate with our volunteers based on detected changes in our data and based on their actions in real time provides a huge boost to our volunteer experience. Having these notifications orchestrated reduces staffing requirements and allows our mobilization and communications teams to focus on more important tasks.” —Ed Glover, Team Rubicon Technology Analyst.
By using real-time customer journey orchestration, Team Rubicon can not only re-confirm deployments, they can keep volunteers up to date with changing details such as meeting location, date or time updates. With CJO, they were able to reduce the overall number of segments maintained by 35 percent and reduce the human effort to build, send and monitor these notifications by as much as 8 hours per week. Team Rubicon is excited to expand the use of CJO to cover additional elements of their overall communications strategy.
Orchestrating journeys that go beyond marketing to deliver a congruous experience to customers
One of the existing Dynamics 365 customers that have been evaluating and using real-time customer journey orchestration since its preview release is HP. The team at HP clearly knows that customer care goes beyond support. It’s about connecting the various customer interactions into a single, holistic experience that delights customers.
To achieve this, HP wants to provide both enterprise customers and home consumers with exceptional customer service. The company is working to enhance its support experience with Dynamics 365 Marketing customer journey orchestration. By providing a more personalized experience, HP keeps the customer experience positive and builds lifetime loyalty, while also reducing support call times and lowering operational costs.
“With customer-led journey orchestration in Dynamics 365 Marketing, our agents can gain a real-time, 360-degree view of each customer and their support experience.” —Jibu Mathew, Project Manager, HP Inc.
With end-to-end journey orchestration, HP’s goal is to keep each customer informed throughout the customer support lifecycle. This is achieved by delivering a highly personalized and context-aware experience using multiple channels including SMS and email. As the customer’s support case proceeds towards resolution, the customer plus the case data are orchestrated in a unified, end-to-end journey. By bringing the customer and case data together, HP is able to deliver a consistent and highly integrated experience to their customers.
These are just a few examples of how businesses are evaluating and implementing solutions based on our new customer journey orchestration capabilities and how we are empowering customer experience-focused organizations to unleash the power of data and AI to deeply personalize customer communications so that every interaction counts in the moments that matter. When you build on our trusted and adaptable platform, the creativity and experience design possibilities are limitless and you can start using them today.
Learn more and get started
Join me over the next few weeks for a three-part blog series that will give us a deeper look into how businesses are already using customer journey orchestration and driving business value.
Until then, to learn more about how your organization can elevate your customer experiences, visit the Dynamics 365 Marketing webpage and sign up for a free trial to explore real-time customer journey orchestration and the other rich capabilities offered in Dynamics 365 Marketing.
