Failing Forward – What We Learned at Cisco from a “Failed” Digital Orchestration Pilot

The fashionable buyer expertise is fraught with friction:

You communicate to a buyer consultant, and so they let you know one factor.

You log into your digital account and see one other.

You obtain an electronic mail from the identical firm that tells an fully totally different story.

At Cisco, we’ve got been working to determine these friction factors and evaluating how we are able to orchestrate a extra seamless expertise—remodeling the client, accomplice, and vendor expertise to be prescriptive, useful – and, most significantly, easy. This will not be a simple process when working within the complexity of environments, applied sciences, and consumer areas that Cisco does enterprise in, however it isn’t insurmountable.

We simply closed out a year-long pilot of an industry-leading orchestration vendor, and by all measures – it failed. In The Lean Startup Eric Ries writes, “if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.” I absolutely subscribe to this angle. If you aren’t prepared to experiment, to strive, to fail, and to guage your learnings, you solely repeat what . You don’t develop. You don’t innovate. You should be prepared to dare to fail, and if you happen to do, to attempt to fail ahead.

So, whereas we didn’t renew the contract, we did proceed down our orchestration journey outfitted with a yr’s value of learnings and newly refined path on learn how to sort out our initiatives.

Our Digital Orchestration Goals

We began our pilot with 4 key orchestration use circumstances:

1. Seamlessly join prescriptive actions throughout channels to our sellers, companions, and clients.
2. Pause and resume a digital electronic mail journey based mostly on triggers from different channels.
3. Connect analytics throughout the multichannel buyer journey.
4. Easily combine information science to department and personalize the client journey.

Let’s dive a bit deeper into every. We’ll have a look at the use case, the challenges we encountered, and the steps ahead we’re taking.

Use Case #1: Seamlessly join prescriptive actions throughout channels to our sellers, companions, and clients.

Today we course of and ship business-defined prescriptive actions to our buyer success representatives and companions when we’ve got digitally recognized adoption obstacles in our buyer’s deployment and utilization of our SaaS merchandise.

In our legacy state, we have been executing a collection of advanced SQL queries in Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Automation Studio to affix a number of information units and output the particular actions a buyer wants. Then, utilizing Marketing Cloud Connect, we wrote the output to the process object in Salesforce CRM to generate actions in a buyer success agent’s queue. After this motion is written to the duty object, we picked up the log in Snowflake, utilized further filtering logic and wrote actions to our Cisco accomplice portal – Lifecycle Advantage, which is hosted on AWS.

There are a number of key points with this workflow:

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud will not be meant for use as an ETL platform; we have been already encountering day out points.
• The accomplice actions have been depending on the vendor processing, so it launched complexity if we ever wished to pause one workflow whereas sustaining the opposite.
• The growth course of was advanced, and it was troublesome to introduce new really helpful actions or to layer on further channels.
• There was no suggestions loop between channels, so it was not doable for a buyer success consultant to see if a accomplice had taken motion or not, and vice versa.

Thus, we introduced in an orchestration platform – a spot the place we are able to join a number of information sources by means of APIs, centralize processing logic, and write the output to activation channels. Pretty rapidly in our implementation, although, we encountered challenges with the orchestration platform.

The Challenges

• The complexity of the joins in our queries couldn’t be supported by the orchestration platform, so we needed to preprocess the actions earlier than they entered the platform after which they might be routed to their respective activation channels. This was our first pivot. In our technical evaluation of the platform, the seller assured us that our queries might be supported within the platform, however in precise follow, that proved woefully inaccurate. So, we migrated probably the most advanced processing to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and solely left easy logic within the orchestration platform to determine which motion a buyer required and write that to the right activation channel.
• The person interface abstracted components of the code creating dependencies on an exterior vendor. We spent appreciable time attempting to decipher what went flawed by way of trial and error with out entry to correct logs.
• The connectors have been extremely particular and required vendor help to setup, modify, and troubleshoot.

Our Next Step Forward

These three challenges pressured us to suppose in another way. Our purpose was to centralize processing logic and hook up with information sources in addition to activation channels. We have been already leveraging GCP for preprocessing, so we migrated the rest of the queries to GCP. In order to unravel for our must handle APIs to allow information consumption and channel activation, we turned to Mulesoft. The mixture of GCP and Mulesoft helped us obtain our first orchestration purpose whereas giving us full visibility to the end-to-end course of for implementation and help.

Use Case #2:  Pause and resume a digital electronic mail journey based mostly on triggers from different channels.

We targeted on trying to pause an electronic mail journey in a Marketing Automation Platform (Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Eloqua) if a buyer had a mid-to-high severity Technical Assistance Center (TAC) Case open for that product.

Again, we set out to do that utilizing the orchestration platform. In this state of affairs, we wanted to pause a number of digital journeys from a single set of processing logic within the platform.

The Challenge

We did decide that we might ship the pause/resume set off from the orchestration platform, nevertheless it required establishing a one-to-one match of journey canvases within the orchestration platform to journeys that we would wish to pause within the advertising and marketing automation platform. The use of the orchestration platform truly launched extra complexity to the workflow than managing ourselves.

Our Next Step Forward

Again, we seemed on the recognized problem and the instruments in our toolbox. We decided that if we arrange the processing logic in GCP, we might consider all journeys from a single question and ship the pause set off to all related canvases within the advertising and marketing automation platform – a way more scalable construction to help.

Another strike towards the platform, however one other victory in forcing a brand new mind-set about an issue and discovering an answer we might help with our present tech stack. We additionally anticipate the methodology we established to be leveraged for different kinds of decisioning akin to journey prioritization, journey acceleration, or pausing a journey when an adoption barrier is recognized and a really helpful motion intervention is initiated.

Use Case #3: Connect analytics throughout the multichannel buyer journey.

We execute journeys throughout a number of channels. For occasion, we might ship a renewal notification electronic mail collection, present a customized renewal banner on Cisco.com for customers of that firm with an upcoming renewal, and allow a self-service renewal course of on renew.cisco.com. We gather and analyze metrics for every channel, however it’s troublesome to point out how a buyer or account interacted with every digital entity throughout their total expertise.

Orchestration platforms provide analytics views that show Sankey diagrams so journey strategists can visually evaluation how clients have interaction throughout channels to guage drop off factors or significantly vital engagements for optimization alternatives.

The Challenge

• As we set out to do that, we realized the biggest blocker to unifying this information will not be actually a problem an orchestration platform innately solves simply by means of executing the campaigns by means of their platform. The largest blocker is that every channel makes use of totally different identifiers for the client. Email journeys use electronic mail tackle, net personalization makes use of cookies related at an account degree, and the e-commerce expertise makes use of person ID login. The root of this challenge is the shortage of a singular identifier that may be threaded throughout channels.
• Additionally, we found that our analytics and metrics workforce had present gaps in attribution reporting for websites behind SSO login, akin to renew.cisco.com.
• Finally, since many groups at Cisco are driving net site visitors to Cisco.com, we noticed a big inconsistency with how totally different groups have been tagging (and never tagging) their respective net campaigns. To be capable to obtain a real view of the client journey finish to finish, we would wish to undertake a standard language for tagging and monitoring our campaigns throughout enterprise models at Cisco.

Our Next Step Forward

Our workforce started the method to undertake the identical tagging and monitoring hierarchy and system that our advertising and marketing group makes use of for his or her campaigns. This will enable our groups to bridge the hole between a buyer’s pre-purchase and post-purchase journeys at Cisco—enabling a extra cohesive buyer expertise.

Next, we wanted to sort out the info threading. Here we recognized what mapping tables existed (and the place) to have the ability to map totally different marketing campaign information to a single information hierarchy. For this explicit instance for renewals, we wanted to sort out three totally different information hierarchies:

1. Party ID related to a singular bodily location for a buyer who has bought from Cisco
2. Web cookie ID
3. Cisco login ID

With the introduction of constant, cross Cisco-BU monitoring IDs in our Cisco.com net information, we’ll map a Cisco login ID again to an internet cookie ID to fill in a number of the net attribution gaps we see on websites like renew.cisco.com after a person logs in with SSO.

Once we had established that degree of information threading, we might develop our personal Sankey diagrams utilizing our present Tableau platform for Customer Journey Analytics. Additionally, leveraging our present tech stack helps restrict the variety of reporting platforms used to make sure higher metrics consistency and simpler upkeep.

Use Case #4: Easily combine information science to department and personalize the client journey.

We wished to discover how we are able to take the output of a knowledge science mannequin and pivot a journey to supply a extra personalised, guided expertise for that buyer. For occasion, let’s have a look at our buyer’s renewal journey. Today, they obtain a four-touchpoint journey reminding them to resume. Customers may also open a chat or have a consultant name or electronic mail them for added help. Ultimately, the journey is identical for a buyer no matter their probability to resume. We have, nonetheless, a churn danger mannequin that might be leveraged to change the expertise based mostly on excessive, medium, or low danger of churn.

So, if a buyer with an upcoming renewal had a excessive danger of churn, we might set off a prescriptive motion to escalate to a human for engagement, and we might additionally personalize the e-mail with a extra pressing message for that person. Whereas a buyer with a low danger for churn might have an upsell alternative weaved into their notification or we might route the low-risk clients into advocacy campaigns.

The targets of this use case have been primarily:

1. Leverage the output of a knowledge science mannequin to personalize the client’s expertise
2. Pivot experiences from digital to human escalation based mostly on information triggers.
3. Provide context to assist buyer brokers perceive the chance and higher have interaction the client to drive the renewal.

The Challenge

This was truly a quite pure match for an orchestration platform. The problem we entered right here was the info refresh timing. We wanted to refresh the renewals information to be processed by the churn danger mannequin and align that with the timing of the triggered electronic mail journeys. Our renewals information was refreshed in the beginning of each month, however we maintain our sends till the tip of the month to permit our companions a while to evaluation and modify their clients’ information previous to sending. Our orchestration platform would solely course of new, incremental information and overwrite based mostly on a pre-identified major key (this allowed for higher system processing to not simply overwrite all information with each refresh).

To get round this challenge, our vendor would create a model new view of the desk previous to our triggered ship so that each one information was newly processed (not simply any new or up to date data). Not solely did this create a vendor dependency for our journeys, nevertheless it additionally launched potential high quality assurance points by requiring a pre-launch replace of our information desk sources for our manufacturing journeys.

Our Next Step Forward

One query we stored asking ourselves as we struggled to make this use case work with the orchestration platform—have been we overcomplicating issues? The two orchestration platform outputs of our attrition mannequin use case have been to:

1. Customize the journey content material for a person relying on their danger of attrition.
2. Create a human touchpoint in our digital renewal journey for these with a excessive attrition danger.

For primary, we might truly obtain that utilizing dynamic content material modules inside Gross salesForce Marketing Cloud if we merely added a “risk of attrition” discipline to our renewals information extension and created dynamic content material modules for low, medium, and excessive danger of attrition values. Done!

For quantity two, doesn’t that sound form of acquainted? It ought to! It’s the identical downside we wished to unravel in our first use case for prescriptive calls to motion. Because we already labored to create a brand new structure for scaling our really helpful actions throughout a number of channels and audiences, we might work so as to add a department for an “attrition risk” alert to be despatched to our Cisco Renewals Managers and companions based mostly on our information science mannequin. A suggestions loop might even be added to gather information on why a buyer might not select to resume after this human connection is made.

Finding Success

At the tip of our one-year pilot, we had been pressured to consider the techniques to realize our targets very in another way. Yes, we had deemed the pilot a failure – however how can we fail ahead? As we encountered every problem, we took a step again and evaluated what we realized and the way we might use that to realize our targets.

Ultimately, we found out new methods to leverage our present methods to not solely obtain our core targets but additionally allow us to have end-to -end visibility of our code so we are able to arrange the processing, refreshes, and connections precisely how our enterprise requires.

Now – we’re making use of every of those learnings.  We are rolling out our core use circumstances as capabilities in our present structure, constructing an orchestration stock that may be leveraged throughout the corporate – an enormous step in direction of success for us and for our clients’ expertise.  The final result was not what we anticipated, however every step of the method helped propel us towards the proper options.

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