Editorial
The Gist
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Own less and orchestrate more. You can’t control every touchpoint anymore, but you can shape how they work together to build loyalty.
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Map the maze. Winning customer loyalty means knowing who influences the experience and how each moment adds up.
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Measure what matters. New roles require new metrics to track impact, guide strategy and prove CX value.
What if you could own the entire customer journey and control each aspect to maximize loyalty? It would be great, and it might even seem necessary since every touchpoint grows or decays loyalty, but it’s no longer realistic. There are too many channels and contributors, and many are outside your four walls, among them retail partners, payment platforms, internet influencers and now AI agents. My firm, PwC, is all-in on AI agents, and they’re great at helping evolve how we work. But no one can own every AI agent that their customers encounter.
It’s time to lose the idea of total control. Yet we still need to deliver experiences that win and keep customer loyalty.
Table of Contents
Meet Your New Day Job: Orchestration
Fifty-one percent of CMOs say they’re increasing investments in the customer experience. But will that deliver the customer loyalty they’re looking for? The answer depends on how you orchestrate your experience supply chain. What exists today is a fragmented ecosystem of people and companies delivering experiences that customers combine in their own unique ways.
Like supply chain leaders coordinating complex logistics, you need to orchestrate touchpoints, both the few you own and the many you don’t, so that customers get an appealing, coherent experience. You win loyalty when every touchpoint in a decentralized landscape aligns to reinforce a clear strategy. Sometimes that means owning the touchpoint. More often, it means helping trusted people and platforms do the heavy lifting for you.
How can you get the experience supply chain of your dreams, one that’s engaging, agile, trackable and cost effective? Here are five things you can do.
Map It
Who’s influencing your customer experience and its impact on loyalty? Where and how are your customers creating their own experiences? Map out touchpoints, channels, tools and who’s doing what where.
Pick Your Battles
For each touchpoint, decide your role. Are you owning it, enabling others, standing back and reaping the benefit, or monitoring to protect your brand? Do what you do best and work with or monitor others as they do the rest.
Update Your Capabilities
Shifting focus from ownership to journey orchestration requires new capabilities, such as linking third-party touchpoints and finding better ways to collect and manage data. You’ll also need flexibility to integrate new channels (like VR) and tools (like AI agents) as they mature.
Get Your People up to Speed
Marketers are team players, but the team is bigger now. Adjust strategy and operations to help people collaborate more outside your walls. Support people, platforms and customers as they create value for you.
Prove Your Value
Consider new metrics to measure the impact of each stage and role in your experience supply chain. The right ones will help you demonstrate success and fine-tune your strategy for winning and keeping customer loyalty.
Related Article: Customer Journey Orchestration in the Age of AI
Learn to Love Your New Role
If you’ve risen to the top of a marketing function, it may not be easy to give up control. But today’s customer experience landscape is so complex, it doesn’t make sense to go it alone. If you embrace the experience supply chain and your role as orchestrator, you may be better able to delight customers, all while you and your team focus on where you create the most value.
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