Real time marketing is here with Microsoft Dynamics’ customer journey orchestration
How easy is it for your customers to do business with you?
In this digital age, customer experience is rapidly becoming the most important priority for organizations to focus on. Personalized communication is critical to gaining and retaining customers.
In August, Microsoft made customer journey orchestration capabilities generally available to those using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.
It’s being called a gamechanger — and for good reason. If you’ve heard of real time marketing, that’s exactly what customer journey orchestration is. It evolves Dynamics 365 Marketing from its outbound marketing capabilities oriented around mass communications, into a smarter system that can create personalized messages based off of a customer’s specific action.
Here are some examples of how you can leverage customer journey orchestration throughout your organization:
B2C sales and marketing: By adding code to your e-commerce website, you can tell Dynamics 365 Marketing to send personalized emails to customers with the items they abandoned in their shopping cart, giving them a coupon code and inviting them to finish their purchase.
You can also use Dynamics 365 Marketing to communicate to customers when they enter your store. Below, you can see that a customer connecting to your in-store Wi-Fi triggers a journey. If the customer is a loyalty member, the system will push an app notification to them offering either an in-store-exclusive coupon or a list of recommendations tailored to that customer. If they aren’t a loyalty member, the system will use the best communication channel available to offer them points to sign up.
It’s all about sending the right message to the right customer at the right time.
Customer service: Once you close a customer’s case, Dynamics 365 Marketing emails the customer the case info, its resolution, who solved the case, next steps (if any) and a survey link. It’s much more personalized than the generic messaging the system was only capable of sending prior to this update, and it benefits your organization in that it allows you to communicate with your customers in the way your customers want to be communicated to.
Additionally, if a customer has an issue with their order and submits a case to get it solved, Dynamics 365 Marketing recognizes the open case and will refrain from emailing the customer sales/marketing emails until it’s resolved.
Volunteer management: Nonprofits can leverage Dynamics 365 Marketing’s real-time marketing capabilities, too.
For example, Team Rubicon has almost 150,000 volunteers that it sends around the world to assist with disaster recovery. Prior to leveraging customer journey orchestration, Team Rubicon had a nine-stage process where its staff manually approved and scheduled the volunteers that signed up for an event, purchased their flights, sent confirmation emails, etc. Each event required staff to create nine unique customer journeys due to the specific URLs, dates and points of contact involved. With over 200 events a year, Team Rubicon’s staff was spending a lot of time and effort in this area.
With the introduction of customer journey orchestration, Team Rubicon was able to create one customer journey for each stage of the volunteer process and then start reusing them across each event. This has drastically reduced administration costs, reduced the number of segments maintained by 35% and saved Team Rubicon staff eight hours’ worth of work per week, allowing the staff to focus on mentoring volunteers and planning the operation at hand.
In addition, customer journey orchestration’s flexibility has allowed Team Rubicon to further send the right messages at the right time. The system automatically takes time zones into account and is not sending volunteers in Hawaii emails at the same time as volunteers in New York. The end result puts the volunteer experience front and center, allowing for a more cohesive and user-friendly communication experience.
If you have Fundraising and Engagement, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, E-commerce, Volunteer management, Events, etc., you should look at using Customer Journey Orchestration for sending communication to your customers so it gets to them when they want it, how they want it, and sensitive to what other communication has already been sent to or is in progress.
Wipfli can help you get started with real time marketing
Are you excited about Dynamics 365 Marketing’s new customer journey orchestration?
Wipfli’s technology consultants helped Team Rubicon make the transition and see the drastic results they have seen so far. We can help do the same for your organization. Click here to get started.
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