Customer journey orchestration — tools to create seamless experiences

From the client point of view, the customer journey should be quick and straightforward. But to ensure trust, security and compliance, organizations need multiple services and applications to work together seamlessly. Customer journey orchestration tools sync workflows to ensure the proper checks are done in the correct order and information is shared appropriately with all systems and people.

The complexities of onboarding new customers are immense. It’s one thing if you are offering one product to one market. But the global opportunities for doing business mean that you often have multiple jurisdictions, products and risk scenarios to consider. Add on top of that different tools and numerous internal teams, the number of paths and permutations becomes an operational challenge.

Not only do the tools need to work together, but they also need to be:

• Quick
  Slow, cumbersome processes will agitate customers and might lead to abandonment. With properly designed workflows, onboarding is relatively quick and encourages the customer.
• Accurate
  Information that is not collected, misassigned or neglected leads to bad outcomes, from missed opportunities to wasted time. Effective customer journey management helps ensure that everyone has the correct information to do their job.
• Holistic
  Without considered scenarios, automation can’t do its job, creating false positives or weak checks and balances. Workflows that are robust and adaptable enable the ability to refine processes to better match real-world inputs continually.
• Scalable
  More stakeholders, tools, markets and customer journeys can bog down processes. The ability to scale a quick, accurate and holistic customer journey orchestration solution will help future-proof your organization for continual customer growth.

Getting all your tools and services harmoniously working together is a powerful vision to serve your customers better, coordinate your people and deliver excellent sign-up experiences.

Risk-based automation workflows

Customer journey orchestration is about deploying a coherent risk-based approach. Every customer journey is different and poses a unique risk scenario that requires appropriate management controls.

To simplify the process, automation workflows:

1. Take in data
2. Perform checks and analysis
3. Proceed to the appropriate next step of the journey

The critical concept is the appropriate next step; what workflow path will go next? This decisioning step is about taking in all the relevant information and branching to the correct path for that scenario.

Understanding all the different trust and risk signals and how they work together is fundamental to creating effective workflows. What tool or service is that information available from? How accurate is that information? What happens if the information is contradictory, vague or missing? Orchestration that doesn’t consider all the options is not fulfilling its mission.

That’s not to say there’s an optimum workflow. Instead, it’s about finding the right balance for your risk approach and organization. Measuring successful automation workflows is about finding the correct levels for:

• Safely speeding most customers through onboarding
• Detecting the majority of questionable activities
• Minimizing manual checks

Having automation deal with most journeys allows your organizational talent to focus on edge cases and understanding analytics to improve program performance.

Orchestrating onboarding workflows

Building onboarding workflows was traditionally in systems integration and custom coding. As each application needed its development efforts, costs and deployment time was considerable.

The surge in the use of APIs has made integration quicker and simpler. But dedicated development resources are still required for initial builds and continual improvement; building and optimizing customer journeys are ongoing as new requirements, fraud techniques, and operational feedback require refinement.

The next generation of customer journey orchestration is using no-code development tools. Instead of traditional hand-coded computer programming, this lets you create workflows through a graphical user interface (GUI) and configurations. It gives people with limited or no programming knowledge the ability to develop and refine complex operational workflows.

Instead of waiting for developers, your compliance, risk, and fraud experts can build and manage customer journeys. And as they are the experts in creating your risk management strategies, they can quickly devise and revise workflows that fit your needs.

No-code development speeds up the delivery of workflows and optimizes onboarding teams. You can build compliant, best-in-class flows for every process. And you can launch completely digital client onboarding flows in minutes, not months.

Customer journey orchestration tools will help you fine-tune your onboarding program by improving experiences, coordinating your risk-based approach, and increasing your opportunity to refine and optimize processes.