Customer Journey Orchestration

To be honest, I have been struggling to keep my mouth shut about this for the last couple of months. You might have seen my post during Ignite and I could hardly contain my excitement! ?? At work, I've been following the development of this for a while now and not been able to speak about it...!

With this article, I can finally walk through the new real-time features in D365 Marketing, Customer Journey Orchestration! It was officially announced at Microsoft Ignite back in April and during MBAS it was made available for preview with Dynamics 365 Marketing.

What is it?

Customer Journey Orchestration is bringing the ability to trigger customer journeys in real-time! To pick the right channel for each customer, and react to customer-led actions. You can orchestrate customer experiences for a segment of 1. Based on current actions or activities your brand can become even more relevant to your customers. This is what D365 Marketing is enabling across all your customer touchpoints.

Regardless of industry, this is extremely powerful! Let's dig into the details! ??

Customer Engagement:

Customer Journey Orchestration is within the application area in D365 Marketing called Real-time Marketing. Inside the Real-time marketing (RT) area, we find functionality split into four main topics, Customer Engagement, Audience, Channels and Assets.

Get started - simply put, just an overview page. Links to help/guidance on how to get started and to learn what the different elements are.

Journeys - this is where the real-time orchestration takes place within an easy to use editor for your customer journeys. You start with either an event trigger or a segment, and from there create the journey with branches or exit criteria. You can also use triggers and branches along the journey to build complex journeys.

Journeys also have actions and elements. If you have used D365 Marketing and Customer Journeys these are similar to branches and actions there.

Currently, there is no way to "holistically" see your journey in real-time marketing, so you will need to do some scrolling in all directions if you are creating complex and multi-branched journeys.

To add your content or messages there are multiple ways to best target your customers with actions; either select the channel you want, let AI make the selection for you or configure A/B test cross channel or use AI to select the best channel for each person.

Other elements: Respond to an action (event trigger) and the delay allowed to "count" the persons' response and if completed, will move the person to the yes branch. If it takes longer they will move into the "no" branch.

Branched based on a specific value either from the contact, event trigger or segment. This has been a wanted feature to tailor messages even deeper and not just a random split which is currently possible in Outbound Marketing.

Hold an action - here you can configure the journey to hold people in a specific step until a set amount of time has passed, a specific time/date or time/date attributes specified by an event trigger.

Analytics - Providing insights to journeys in an aggregated view cross-journeys. This overview is bringing in your goals, channels, and content's effectiveness and even identifying frictions or stalled actions to improve.

Event Triggers - This is where the real-time magic can start. There is an available library of triggers, or you can simply bring in your custom events to capture any customer action or business event.

Interaction Events bring in interaction through i.e emails delivered, bounced or i.e. opened. Business Events are triggers on changes to your records in i.e. Dynamics 365 Sales or Customer Service. This can be such as leads created or specific fields that have changed.

I have created a custom event, being a scanned membership card to trigger my journey. Without configuring this end to end with a developer, securing that I can get the scanned card data, this is currently not a working event trigger.

Audience:

Segment - My segments are available across both real-time and outbound. Currently, there is no option to create new segments, deactivate or make my segments active directly from the real-time area. To do so I would need to navigate to the outbound marketing area first.

Consent Center - By reading the documentation, consent centre in real-time marketing is per email or phone number basis. It does not link to the contact or consent stored in association with the contact record. To add consent data, it can be loaded in from Outbound Marketing, imported from a file or manually added or changed.

Loading is a one-time job, and you can then continue to manage consent if needed. However, I did not get this working and only added consent manually for my email and phone number.

With changes in the future to my consent, this will be tracked with reasons for why, by whom it was changed and a source.

Channels:

Email - The email editor contains some of the same Standard elements as in Outbound Marketing. Elements such as Code snippets, QR code and content blocks are missing when comparing to the editor in outbound.

Not able to select the email templates I've already created in Outbound Marketing was disappointing. This I hope will be possible with the GA version. I don't want the double work of re-doing the templates yet again. I would personally only templates that could be reused across both areas.

Push notifications - bringing you the option to send push notifications to your mobile apps, for both iOS and Android. By configuring a connection between your existing mobile application that is already published on an app store and D365 Marketing. You can then push for both internal and external behaviour to open a link in-app or in a browser.

SMS - Editor to tailor SMS to your customers by generating a sender phone number. At the moment this is limited to a US prefix number and can only be classified as transactional during the Preview.

You can add personalized content, emojis and URLs to your SMS messages.

Assets:

Asset Library - Currently the asset library is not synced with your existing media library, but it sure has some additional features. When uploading new media, AI will suggest tags to both recommend assets when generating content for emails. Currently, the assets can only be image files such as jpg/jpeg, gif and png formats.

A few of my plant photos were tagged by the AI as coffee, as the soil is dark close to something that looks like a pot. I've not been able to correct this, so currently, that feature is missing.

Templates - Same as in Outbound Marketing, I can choose to create new or edit existing templates. Preview functionality is slightly different where I now can add the sample text and don't need to select a contact to preview as or select correct content setting.

I am hoping the content setting feature will be a part of the full release as there is a few elements that have become a bit more difficult.

However, I did a test to copy/paste the HTML from an "old" template and that worked just fine. I had to update the personalized fields, put in the new URL for the consent and legal address for it to work. The images are still "hosted" in the old media library, but these are "live" and online and would be similar to linking to a imaged hosted anywhere on the open web.

Get ready to use it!

The first thing I did after getting the preview functionality enabled in D365 Marketing was to orchestrate my first Customer Journey! This will come in its own article coming during the next couple of days.

If you can't wait; check out the demo from my favourite (totally unbiased) example from UNICEF here.

How to get it?

First of all, you have to enable this in your environment. This didn't take long at all and it was super easy. Just follow this guide at the docs and you're all set. (Not available in all regions, but North America and Europe at the moment).

And again, it's a preview. A preview feature is a feature that is not complete but is made available before it’s officially in a release so customers, like you and me, can get early access and provide feedback. You can do so in the marketing idea forum!