Org chart or outcomes: Are you orchestrating the customer journey or just your departments?

Let’s be honest: the term “customer journey orchestration” (CJO) might sound like a buzzword that’s long since lost its shine. But the problem it was meant to solve — the frustration customers feel when their experience is disjointed and inconsistent — is still very much alive. This disconnect drives up costs and churn, eroding loyalty and revenue.

Most companies have made some attempt at orchestration, even if they don’t call it that. Yet customers still face frustrating, fragmented experiences that drive them away.

The reality is that despite better tools like AI, Voice of the Customer (VoC), sentiment analysis, and journey analytics, many brands struggle to connect the dots across the full customer journey.

So, what exactly is customer journey orchestration and why is getting it right so critical for your CX?

What is customer journey orchestration?

At its core, CJO is about knowing who your customer is, where they are in their journey, and where they’re trying to go (even if they haven’t said it outright). Then it’s about showing up in that moment on the channel where the customer wants to be met with the right information, the right support, the right action.

Done well, customer interacting with your brand will feel it's easy. For some journeys, it should feel invisible, like automatically paying a monthly utility bill. For others, like buying a new car, it should feel exciting and filled with pride. But either way, when it’s orchestrated well, customers feel momentum, not friction.

The problem is that most companies aren’t mapping the journey the way a customer experiences it. They map it the way their org chart is structured. And that’s where things break down. 

Customers don’t distinguish between your departments

Everyone wants to be the Amazon of their industry — but most miss the real reason Amazon wins. I asked people at Amazon why no one else can match their experience. Their answer was straightforward: “We start with the customer and work backward.” Most companies start with their internal org chart and work forward.

When you shop on Amazon, you never think about how many teams handle your order. The person managing the website isn’t the one packing your box or arranging delivery, but it doesn’t matter. You just click a button and your order arrives. Amazon carefully hides its seams.

Most companies don’t. They invest heavily in customer acquisition — refining sales funnels, optimizing onboarding flows — but then hand things off to entirely separate teams for service, operations, and fulfillment. That’s where the experience often breaks. A billing issue, a delayed delivery, a missing answer and suddenly the journey becomes a maze of transfers and hold times. Where Amazon hides these handoffs, most companies expose their silos.

From the customer’s perspective, the journey with a new insurance company doesn’t end when the policy is purchased. It continues to the next interaction — a claim, a question, a bill — if that touchpoint is clunky or frustrating, it erases any goodwill you earned up front. Customers don’t experience your org chart. They experience your brand as one continuous relationship.

This is the problem my colleagues and I keep telling clients: corporate silos are the enemy of CX. Every time a customer is forced to repeat themselves or a handoff fails, the silo wins — and trust is lost.

Inside, the company celebrates functional wins. But customers judge outcomes. Did they get what they needed? Or did they have to start over?

And when trust falters, it is not just loyalty on the line. It is your bottom line. Winning a customer back is far more expensive than keeping a current one. Studies show that acquiring customers can cost six to seven times more than retaining them. That is revenue you left on the table every time the journey breaks.

Lessons from the gig economy 

If you want to see orchestration done well outside of Amazon, look at the gig economy. DoorDash, Uber, Lyft. They have no choice but to think this way.

When you order food on DoorDash, the experience crosses multiple parties: the app, the restaurant, the driver. But to you, the customer, it’s one thing: “Get my food to my door.”

These companies design around that single outcome, not around the complexity behind the scenes. They can’t afford the customer to feel those handoffs because the switching cost is too low. If something goes wrong, you’ll just order from someone else next time.

Legacy brands, though? They still think in business units. They optimize sales. Then service. Then billing. But no one owns the relationship as a continuous experience. And that’s usually where the experience breaks down.  

So why aren’t brands fixing it?

That’s the million-dollar question. The tools are better. The customer expectation is higher. The stakes couldn’t be clearer. 

Yet most brands still optimize in silos. 

They streamline onboarding to improve acquisition. They drop in a chatbot to ease pressure on the contact center. These kinds of fixes aren’t inherently wrong, but without understanding how they fit into the bigger picture, they rarely solve the real problem. And a local improvement doesn’t guarantee a better customer experience. Sometimes, it even just shifts the friction downstream.

Given this, I don’t know why brands still struggle to orchestrate the full customer journey. Is it because the ROI is hard to pin down? Because companies are too big, too entrenched, or too political to work across silos? Because customers haven’t made enough noise?

Whatever the reason, it should make brands nervous. Because customers are comparing you to Amazon. To DoorDash. To the last best experience they had. Whether you like the comparison or not.

Where to start

The gig economy and Amazon aren’t futuristic, they’re today’s benchmark. And we know from Gartner that journey mapping and orchestration can significantly reduce attrition.  Yet 70% of CX leaders are still rethinking their customer journeys, which tells you brands know it matters, they just haven’t acted.

If you’re tired of organizational silos derailing your customer experience, here’s a simple framework:

1. Map the real journey the way your customers experience it, end-to-end, not department by department.
2. Use data & AI to identify and address friction in real time.
3. Enable touchpoints, whether with humans or bots, with context at the moment of interaction.
4. Define the measurement systems for the journey and hold one team accountable for the journey outcome, not just the function.

At TTEC Digital, we’ve helped brands bring CX strategy, tech and data together so experiences actually work. 

So here’s the real question: How much longer can you afford the cost of disconnected experiences in churn, in loyalty, in lifetime value?

To get to the answer, start by uncovering where the journey breaks. Then you have two options: keep polishing the parts or finally orchestrate the full experience customers want to stay for.