What is intelligent orchestration? Intelligent orchestration is the consistent delivery of relevant, contextually aware, and hyper-personalized next-best actions across all customer journey stages and all enterprise touchpoints.
Intelligent orchestration is analogous to the conversationalist who always says the right thing at the right time, rather than coming up with the perfect response an hour later on the way home from the party. In customer engagement terms, it is always seizing the right moment of interaction with a customer.
For a retailer suddenly experiencing a surge in ecommerce, intelligent orchestration is the basis for always displaying the right product and always making the right offer, accounting for every decision and every behavior the customer makes up to and including a visit to a specific web page.
Likewise, for an uptick in curbside pickup or buy online, pick-up in-store (BOPIS) activity, intelligent orchestration coordinates online, physical, and mobile channels to guide a customer journey and ensure for a consistent, seamless experience. Logistically, it ensures product availability matches inventory at a customer’s given location, or coordinates pick-up between the customer and a specific store location. It ensures that an offer for a complementary product is made on the right device before the customer arrives for pick-up.
Drive Relevance, Drive New Revenue
These customer-facing actions are where the rubber meets the road in guiding customer journeys with hyper-personalized experiences that drive new revenue. They exemplify responsive execution of real-time analytics to drive relevant experiences. Behind the scenes, the intelligent orchestration engine at the heart of the Redpoint platform takes into consideration a user’s updated preferences, actions and inactions, and whether they should be included in a segment. A customer’s propensity to buy, lifetime value, likelihood to churn, and other considerations are calculated and updated in real time, optimizing a proper flow of data from the source to every orchestration touchpoint.
Advanced orchestration guarantees there is no under-use or over-use of customer data. This general misuse of data is why 73 percent of customers in the 2019 Harris Poll commissioned by Redpoint said that brands do not meet their expectations for a personalized omnichannel experience. The expectation is for a friction-free experience where the customer feels the brand knows them as an individual. In the same Harris Poll survey, 43 percent of consumers defined a personalized experience as a brand knowing them as the same customer across all touchpoints (in-store, email, mobile, social, website, etc.).
Inner Workings of Orchestration
Intelligent orchestration is a foundational requirement to compete on customer experience. Orchestrating a customer journey begins with orchestrating customer data. Cleansing, matching, merging, data transport, and feeding data into automated machine learning algorithms are necessary steps to guarantee that a customer-facing action is always in concert with the customer in the precise context and cadence of a unique journey.
These steps ensure that marketers have the right data at the right time and the right place. The process automates a next-best action based on the totality of a customer’s behaviors, preferences, and lifetime transactions – and how they relate to one another – in real time.
A real-time component with a rules-based platform is what sets Redpoint intelligent orchestration capabilities apart. Real time in this context not only refers to making real-time decisions, but also real time as it refers to the behind the scenes orchestration machinations. It is real-time decisions based on real-time data.
Advanced orchestration is not bound by a traditional batch cadence, where analytics is done offline from customer interaction, resulting in data latency that minimizes the effectiveness of analytic models. This method might be effective for surface level analytics of segmented customers, with the understanding that keeping pace with an omnichannel customer journey is far beyond its purview. In-line analytics and a real-time decisioning engine free marketers from a reliance on customer engagement strategies that segment customers into geographic, demographic, or other cohorts.
A seamless BOPIS experience, or a website visit where a brand calculates consumer intent based on a totality of behaviors to include that visit, are the types of experiences today’s always-on, continuously connected customer expects. Providing a personalized experience in an omnichannel environment may be a challenge, but the empowered customer awards no points for a good faith effort. Rather, they will reward a consistent, personalized experience with greater wallet share. In a 2019 Merkle study, 66 percent of consumers rate experience ahead of price when making a purchasing decision.
Intelligent orchestration does not take out the inherent complexity of optimizing the use of data from the source to a next-best action, but done correctly it hides that complexity from the consumer. What’s left is a delighted customer, who has a far greater chance of becoming a repeat customer.
