The secret to orchestrating your digital mess

As any modern CIO would tell you, workplaces around the world are overflowing with martech tools to help craft the modern customer experience. But funny enough, the tools at their disposal could be the biggest roadblocks standing in their way.

I’ve talked a lot about the best-of-breed approach, which is quickly becoming the preferred method for getting the right enterprise tools in the hands of the right people. Adopting this strategy is a good first step, but it isn’t everything. The best technology on the market doesn’t automatically produce the most engaging digital experience for your customers. What’s missing is the orchestration layer that ties it all together.

Realistically, no digital experience that spans across channels, merging content and commerce or sales and CRM can exist without a backend that’s orchestrated to a tee. If companies are expected to deliver digital experiences that are seamless and intuitive, the experience behind the curtain should be no different. Unfortunately, that’s often not the case.

Cleaning up your own mess

When you think about it, how on earth can teams manage a customer’s experience if they can’t manage their own? Only when your tech stack is fully in sync can the “futuristic” customer experience come to fruition.

So, what does it take to organize a company’s digital experience from the inside out? This is where orchestration tools come in—a young market that’s about to take off. These solutions are built to piece things together, essentially a puzzle-builder for enterprise technology. Sounds lame, I know, but it’s the most strategic tool for helping companies get where they need to be.

At a high level, orchestrating your tech stack means establishing connectors between tools like Facebook Messenger, email, and Salesforce. Going even deeper, some orchestration tools enable marketers to digitally map out the customer journey, allowing for the personalization of each digital touchpoint. This offers an easy way to bypass complex middleware connectors, giving your team a single tool for orchestrating their digital mess.

The beginning of a truly digital business

For decades, teams have been drawing out the customer journey on whiteboards, but the orchestration market is about to change the game. New tools are automating redundant processes across channels and giving teams control over every aspect of the customer journey. For instance, your team can create an integration between a Marketo campaign and a Facebook Messenger bot, and synchronize these initiatives automatically. As a result, you aren’t putting all your time and resources into one vertical, but operating holistically to unify channels on the backend to bring each area of business under the same roof.

Second, you would be shocked (and a little disappointed) if you knew just how little some of today’s biggest and most successful brands know about their customers. Reason being, having one central system of record for your customers is incredibly uncommon, and this won’t change anytime soon. Instead, they often have different customer profiles across channels, creating information silos. In absence of a unified customer record, brands need a flexible system to connect the various customer profiles across platforms. When every team has access to the same data about a customer—whether it’s pulled from, sales, marketing, direct mail, Twitter or CRM—that’s when an orchestration layer really shows its value, and brings new meaning to a truly digital business.

The fact of the matter is, you need a solid foundation in place to execute effectively. As the enterprise tech market expands to include more types of digital experiences, orchestration tools will become the secret sauce to keeping both internal and external experiences cohesive and seamless. Once we accept this reality, the more exciting our digital future will become.