Customer experiences in auto mode?

I have been using and advocating the use of marketing automation solutions to deliver exceptional digital customer journeys for five years now. I started with Marketo, and added over time expertise for Mautic.com activecampaign.com and Salesforce Marketing cloud. Each platform has its particularities and depending on a company's need one can make more sense than another. The latest releases have started to use Artificial intelligence features enabling to put your customer journeys in auto mode... what does this mean for a marketing organisation?

Integrations

I have seen great progress with the functionalities, the ease of use, and the integration capabilities of these platforms with the whole martech ecosystem. Most solutions offer you a native API connection to the bigger CRM in the marketplace, allow you to connect your platform to Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Adwords for insights and custom audiences creation, to landing pages creations solutions, as well as to agendas, calendars, e-mail solutions. Some have API's with limited calls per day, others are fully open. These integrations enable a company to use Marketing automation as a "data train station" where most of the data flows transit through a marketing automation solution, creating a 360 view of your customer touchpoints and pushing the necessary data points to your CRM.

User interfaces

A lot has been invested into making the solutions more intuitive, more user friendly, for example most of the solutions allow you to build your different user journeys visually, visualize the paths, the options, the decision points, making marketeer lives easier. The basic modules like e-mails, sms, mobile app notifications, landing pages creation have seen developments into wysiwig becoming a standard feature. I do still miss a bit of reporting capabilities and ease of use on some platforms, but there also it is making good progress, at least on the standard kpi's for e-mails or standard conversions KPIs.

Customer journeys automation

A marketing automation solution has as a purpose to enable the creation of specific digital customer journeys based on the data collected from a prospect / customer. You do not need to create your batch campaigns or build multiple landing pages anymore... a marketing automation solution allows you to create engagement with your audience based on a specific logic. You create your journey once, and then your marketing automation solutions run it for you, based on the criterias you specified.

Put your customer journeys on auto mode ?

Most solutions have rolled out some algorithm optimization logic, like predictive engines enabling the display of the best content based on past behaviours. Reading today the content of the latest release on activecampaign solution called "cx automation" here: https://www.activecampaign.com/customer-experience-automation it seems that the industry is going into the next round of automation: the content, the timing and the journey itself will adapt automatically based on data and behaviours!

I have had many discussions in different companies in the last year about simply going away from a "push button to launch a batch campaign" to an approach where we built engagements over touchpoints based on specific customer journeys. How will organisations cope with the letting go of control of which content will reach which prospect / client at what time in which logic ? That remains to be seen! I look forward to this exciting times of creating automated customer experiences.