5 Things You Need To Orchestrate Customer Journeys Across Complex Ecosystems

Last updated on: May 1, 2025

Customer journey orchestration across ecosystem partners isn't easy. You own the customer relationship, so you also own the customer experience being delivered even though you can't fully control touch points outside of your organization. So how can you de-risk your customer journeys to ensure they have good interactions from beginning to end and value their relationship with your brand, even when they engage with your partners? How can you comply with regulators that monitor customer protections if you can't see third party engagements?

According to research from Ernst and Young, 31% of companies use an ecosystem model to provide products and services to customers. Of those that embrace them, ecosystems, on average, contribute nearly 14% of total annual revenues, and approximately 13% in cost reduction and incremental earnings, says the analyst. Companies have expanded their ecosystems since 2020, (likely due to these outcomes) growing from five to seven relationships. Therefore, ecosystem partners are increasingly involved in customer journeys.

High-performing ecosystems drive, on average, 1.5 times the cost reduction, and generate 2.1 times the incremental revenue growth, compared to low-performing ecosystems.

What are customer journeys?

A customer journey is the series of tasks, conversations and actions that a customer goes through with an organization to buy, onboard or gain support for a product or service they've bought. It is important to note that a single touchpoint is not a journey; it's one step in a journey. Series Touchpoints threaded together create the overall experience. The quality of a customer's journey from end-to-end defines their satisfaction. If there are parts of a journey that are fragmented, confusing, disconnected and confusing, it may lead to lost revenue and relationships.

What is customer journey orchestration?

Journey orchestration is designing and then guiding customers through specific steps to onboard, use or get help with a product or service. It is the building of that process and then managing it to ensure customers are progressing through each milestone as quickly and easily as possible. Typically customer journeys consist of a number of steps, often done by separate employees and teams. They usually have their own view into the customer and their own software that is highly efficient for their particular function, but doesn't connect to those who are fulfilling other parts of the journey. Data silos are common in customer journeys, particularly in complicated industries.

Journey Orchestration in ecosystems is tricky

Ecosystem partners are increasingly participating in many parts of the customer journey, but your customer didn’t choose the partners - they chose you. You own the relationship, and you own the quality of the customer experience, even if others deliver it.

Customers hold you accountable for their journey - not your partners. And that’s actually good. Your brand loyalty and ultimately, customer retention depend on it. Anything that diminishes your brand promise weakens customer stickiness.

Therefore, you need journey orchestration tools to create ideal customer interactions, at scale, across their lifecycle to reap the benefits Ernst and Young describe.

Journey orchestration software: Five things you need

When considering a customer orchestration solution, organizations should look for five essential characteristics that address the intricacies of their ecosystem delivery model without adding technical debt that slows down innovation or agility.

1. A view of all interactions across your ecosystem

Journeys don’t stop at department walls - they cross product lines, departments and partners. Your journey orchestration solution has to follow. Look for platforms that have data aggregation connectors to your day-to-day platforms and to your strategic third-party ecosystem partners to create a single shared view.

2. Real-time data on customer CX activity

See a customer's journey status at any minute and solve for friction or obstacles proactively, before he/she becomes frustrated and leaves. Real-time CX data is important for mitigating risk - seeing red flags before customers leave or complain in frustration. Conversely, it can be used to expand personalized offerings based on their activity across the organization. By surfacing instant information to employees and to customers themselves, you make it easy to quickly determine journey progress, what's next and how to help them best reach their goal.

3. Customer journey automation, using AI

Uses AI to surgically evaluate CX and operational efficiency once you have ecosystem data flowing into a centralized orchestration layer. The best orchestration engines specialize in CX but use AI to bolster insights faster than a human can.

"Intelligent experience engines must be surgically focused on microgoals—positive moments composing the entire customer experience." - Harvard Business Review

4. No-code journey orchestrator

Look for a solution anyone in the organization can use without IT training or resources. Drag-and-drop ease can speed up building customer journeys and provide precise control over the sequence of steps, tasks and automations. Unique journeys can be built quickly and then cloned for further curation, making personalization at scale efficient. Business lines must have an orchestrator that gives them the speed to respond to market opportunities, competitive challenges and evolving customer needs. Drag-and-drop journey builders provide that capability, launching new journeys in minutes not months.

5. Compliance visibility and the ability to audit

Orchestration platforms have the opportunity to simplify compliance monitoring and reporting by offering visibility into every customer interaction—regardless of which partner handled it. Regulators expect banks and other regulated industries to document their customer protections, even when third parties are involved. Your platform should provide a time-stamped audit trail across partners, tasks, and channels to meet consumer protection standards and prove issue resolution.

Journeys, our journey orchestration platform

Journeys is OvationCXM's powerful AI-infused customer journey orchestration tool that delivers all five of these vital capabilities. With its builder, you can design and then easily manage customer experiences in real time, incorporating steps and tasks that take place outside of your walls with partners. And surface the journey timeline in a single view that everyone can see. Customer journeys can be built and deployed in minutes vs. weeks or months it takes to change custom code.