Customer journey orchestration engine software is designed to help organizations analyze customer interactions across multiple touchpoints, execute the best communications and predict future customer interaction.

Sounds like the promises marketers have been hearing all along in the digital transformation era, no? Yet, they still have their struggles. Can these journey orchestration engines, or journey visioning platforms as Forrester calls them, deliver on these promises? Can they sit underneath your engagement systems such as marketing automation, email marketing and personalization engines and successfully orchestrate a customer’s journey?

Some say yes, these journey orchestration software platforms can do this. “If you do it right, and that’s a big if, and if it’s capable enough, and that’s another big if, then you should be able to invoke all kinds of activity across all kinds of different customer engagement points,” said Tony Byrne, founder of the Real Story Group. “… I don’t know how else we get to where we want to go without systems like this. That’s why we’re bullish on the concept if not always the vendors. Because otherwise you have all of these different one-to-one point integrations.”What is a Journey Orchestration Platform?

Analysts and vendors in this software arena position these platforms differently, but most promise the collection of customer data based on digital interactions and delivery of the best possible customer engagement actions. 

Here are some industry views of customer journey orchestration software and what it can deliver:Combination of Journey Visioning, Orchestration

In its Forrester Wave: Journey Visioning Platforms, Q4, 2018 (fee required), the research company sees these software platforms falling into two overlapping categories within journey analytics:Journey visioning: Data fusion, journey design and planning, and journey testing and optimization.Journey orchestration: Journey visioning capabilities and also delivers — and places a greater emphasis on — journey automation and orchestration.

The practice of journey analytics, according to Forrester researchers, looks at customer behaviors across multiple touchpoints in order to interact with customers in the best possible way and also predict future interactions. According to Forrester, journey analytics can provide — in terms of capabilities — a combination of data fusion (connecting data dots across customer’s journey), journey design and planning (journey maps that predict future behavior, measure interactions), journey testing and optimization and journey automation and orchestration (predictive and prescriptive analytics for automating interactions).