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Whatever happened to customer journey orchestration?

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Whatever happened to customer journey orchestration?

Five years ago, it seemed like customer journey orchestration technology was having a moment. 

Since then, the marketplace for standalone journey orchestration engine (JOE) platforms has receded. A plateau in sales and numerous vendor acquisitions absorbed nearly all the independent JOE vendors. 

What happened, and what does it mean for you, the martech leader?

First, a bit of history

JOE technology has roots in the pre-digital era, where many “decisioning” platforms helped inform direct mail and telephony-based customer engagement.

Vendors like Infor, SAS, and Pega acquired and merged much of this tech into larger suites and slowly adapted them to the digital age.

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Then the 2010s saw many enterprises undertake “customer journey mapping” projects, often led by external agencies conducting specialized workshops to uncover “as-is” and “to-be” customer journeys. 

The diversity of approaches to visualization, terminology, and even the definition of a “journey” should have been a warning that full-cycle orchestration would prove difficult. 

Not surprisingly, most of these projects led to more tactical, test-and-optimize projects at discrete touchpoints rather than systemic omnichannel overhauls.

Read next: What is customer journey orchestration and how does it work?

Promise and pitfalls

At the same time, a handful of independent, born-digital JOE vendors emerged. They served forward-looking enterprises seeking to provide a more coherent, omnichannel experience for customers. 

Interestingly, the customer data platform (CDP) market — which emerged simultaneously — grew to become a multi-billion dollar arena with dozens of plausible alternatives.

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Yet, the JOE market never really took off. Why not?

First of all, omnichannel journey orchestration is more complicated than it looks. An enterprise specialist might imagine themself sitting at a complex control panel, adjusting dials and knobs to optimize outcomes.

But it turns out that modern customer engagement can be as complicated as nuclear controls, and require comparable levels of education, training and risk reduction. 

Journey orchestration is not as easy as it may first seem.

For JOE technology to work, you need to have at least three things in place, and none of them are easy:

  • Comprehensive, unified and accessible customer data. Almost no firm has this, though everyone is working on it. Sometimes JOE vendors would build in mini-CDPs just to accelerate this process, with predictably poor results.
  • Performant, reliable, customizable, bi-directional connectors to your most important customer engagement touchpoints so you can adequately listen and respond. The term “reliable connector” should give you pause.
  • Interdepartmental strategy and governance to figure out and then execute your tactics across numerous channels: media buys, web, apps, messaging-oriented campaigns, e-commerce, and customer service. Often, we see marketing take the lead here, but this is an enterprise-wide endeavor, and those are hard.

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A changing market

After initial excitement, the JOE market plateaued.

Salesforce dropped its reseller agreement with the largest indie JOE vendor, Thunderhead. Acquia quietly dismissed its JOE partner, Kitewheel. 

Other suite vendors like Adobe and Acoustic only have limited investments in omnichannel orchestration as they focus more on outbound messaging platforms.

Most pointedly, all the major JOE independents have gotten sold off, primarily to “CX” (read: customer listening/service) vendors like Medallia and Qualtrics. 

Whatever happened to customer journey orchestration
The current marketplace reflects the collapse of independent JOE vendors. Source: Real Story Group.

Here again, the contrast with CDPs feels apt. CDPs have become almost a “cost of doing business.” In most cases, the large enterprise needs to deploy one. 

Yet JOE technology has remained more aspirational, requiring a tougher return on investment justification. Recent M&A activity seems to indicate the most profitable thing JOE technology does circa 2022 is to reduce both customer churn and costly call center volumes. 

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The future of journey orchestration technology

This story doesn’t have a sad ending. The need for journey orchestration is not going away. 

While marketers may remain enamored with outbound, message-oriented campaigns, consumers are less optimistic about the resulting deluge of emails, texts, and in-app messages. 

The listen-and-respond motif of journey orchestration platforms will become even more critical as firms transition to subscription-like models that emphasize maximizing lifetime customer value.

Meanwhile, a growing set of CDP vendors is adding lightweight orchestration services to their platforms.

At first, we at Real Story Group were skeptical at this CDP+journey coupling — proper separation of concerns and all that. Yet, we’ve learned that decisioning seems to want to reside close to data. 

Some of our clients find this bundled approach a useful introduction to a complex opportunity.

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They are already moving more heavy-duty artificial intelligence and machine learning operations lower in their data stack (where they can be more closely governed). Putting a light, data-centric orchestration layer on top could present a simple way to leverage some of those models.

In any case, decisioning and journey orchestration are not going away. Instead, they’ll take more time to mature on both the vendor and enterprise sides.

Larger questions revolve around where these services will reside in your future stack. And for that, you have many choices.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


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About The Author

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Tony Byrne is founder of Real Story Group, a technology analyst firm. RSG evaluates martech and CX technologies to assist enterprise tech stack owners. To maintain its strict independence, RSG only works with enterprise technology buyers and never advises vendors.

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

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