In marketing — as in life — it’s not about the destination as much as it’s about the journey.
Which is why research firm Forrester recently released not one, but two Wave reports on Customer Journey Analytics — one on visioning platforms and the other on orchestration. [Subscription or report fees required.] These are the research firm’s first Waves on these topics, in which customer journey analytics is defined as:
An analytics practice that combines quantitative and qualitative data to analyze customer behaviors and motivations across touchpoints and over time to optimize customer interactions and predict future behavior.
Visioning platforms, co-author and principal analyst Joana van den Brink-Quintanilha told me via email, are about designing and planning journeys through such tasks as creating and sharing customer journey maps, or discovering customer segments and personas in those journeys.
The report points to the leaders of visioning tools (NICE, Kitewheel, Thunderhead and Teradata), while ClickFox, Touchpoint Dashboard, SuiteCX, TandemSeven, Adobe, Usermind, ENGAGEcx and Verint provide “competitive options.” Lagging behind is Pointillist. There are brief profiles of the leading product offerings in each report, which only focused on vendors with standalone products.
Orchestration platforms, on the other hand, are about automating and managing customer journeys through workflow and customer interaction, testing and optimization.
[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]
