Earlier this summer, Microsoft announced the general availability of a major new update to its Dynamics 365 marketing platform. It introduced several smart new customer orchestration features that we expect will be game changers for how companies connect with leads and accounts. The goal is to support marketers with both the physical and digital customer journey by making engagements more personalized and responsive than ever before.

Dynamics 365 marketing customer orchestration was released for general availability in August in the United States, and is currently being rolled out worldwide.

Related: Everything you need to know about Dynamics 365

What is customer journey orchestration?

Customer journey orchestration is about coordinating customer experiences in real time. The aim is to be more responsive in how you engage with customers, providing them with more relevant, personalized, and intelligent offers or experiences.

Customer journey orchestration connects different technologies and data to help you plan out the next steps in your relationship with a customer. It lets you get a holistic view of the individual and propose interactions with them that are most appropriate to their context and profile.

Orchestration can have a profound effect on the digital marketing customer journey. Rather than simply communicating with customers based on their segment, it provides a way of creating hyper-personalized, dynamic, and useful engagements.

What can you do with Dynamics 365 marketing customer journey orchestration?

Dynamics 365 for marketing now provides businesses with several new features that can be used to improve customer journey orchestration. These include:

  • Customer journeys triggered by actions

One of the most interesting digital marketing customer journey updates is the ability to generate customer journeys triggered by specific actions. You can now automatically trigger specific journeys when customers do things like:

    • Abandon a cart before checkout
    • Buy specific products or services
    • Offer rewards after a certain number of purchases
    • Spend a certain amount of money
    • Reduce or increase the frequency of their purchases with you
  • Generating personalized content

Dynamics CRM marketing now uses artificial intelligence that lets you send much more personalized content to audience segments.

The system can identify different kinds of customers on your mailing lists and suggests content relevant to them to your marketers. It might, for example, suggest that customers at the top of the funnel should receive emails that contain more introductory information, while those who have purchased from you before will receive more deep dive content.

  • Connecting with other IT systems

One of the greatest benefits of customer journey orchestration in Dynamics 365 marketing is the ability to connect more effectively with other back-office technologies.

For example, if you receive a new shipment of inventory and this is logged in your ERP system, Dynamics 365 will register this. The system can then send a promotional email to customers who have previously bought that product to make them aware that you have new stock in.

  • More sophisticated customer journey design

With digital customer journey orchestration, Microsoft has improved the way that businesses can design customer journeys. It will now be much easier to create detailed and adaptable customer journeys, perform A/B testing, or engage with people using their preferred digital channels

  • A clearer view of the customer

With the digital customer journey orchestration updates in Dynamics 365 marketing, your entire organization can get a more holistic view of individual customers – including previous support experiences.

Learn more: How to improve performance with Dynamics 365 for Marketing

What does digital customer journey orchestration look like?

Let’s compare traditional digital customer journeys with journeys that use Dynamics 365 journey orchestration.

Imagine a store that sells luxury watches – it has a number of physical stores as well as an eCommerce site. Let’s see how the journey for customers would differ based on the level of customer journey orchestration.

Example 1

  • Traditional digital customer journey: A customer visits a physical store to get advice from a member of staff but decides not to buy a watch today. They do, however, sign up to the company’s email newsletter and receive a number of generic promotions.
  • Orchestrated customer journey: The same customer visits the store and agrees to sign up to the newsletter. The employee notes down some of the individual’s watch brand preferences in the system. This means the customer’s newsletter will contain more content about their preferred brands. Also, because the in-store salesclerk knew that individual was a first time watch buyer, the newsletter system includes links to informative, top of funnel blogs (such as guides to buying a luxury watch).

Example 2

  • Traditional digital customer journey: A corporate customer regularly buys watches from the company’s websites as gifts for staff. This year they only ordered half as many watches as they normally do. Unfortunately, the traditional digital customer journey does not trigger any response to find out why fewer watches were ordered.
  • Orchestrated customer journey: Because the company is using automated customer journey orchestration, the Dynamics 365 AI notices the drop in sales this year. It sends a notification to the account manager to find out why sales were so much lower than normal.

We can’t wait to start designing better customer journeys

At Bauen, we help our customers use Dynamics 365 marketing to generate more leads and boost sales. And we are particularly excited by the recently released digital customer journey orchestration tools on the platform.

We believe it can have a significant impact on how businesses interact with their customers, and we cannot wait to begin building even more sophisticated and powerful customer engagement solutions.

Looking for support with Dynamics 365 customer journey orchestration? Contact us today to begin building best in class digital customer journeys.