The data story behind sustainability
Together, digital maturity and connected data empower organizations to embed sustainability into engineering, manufacturing and supply chains
When Customer Journeys Wake Up
Field stories from four real-time marketing projects
Across Europe, most companies still do not run a fully integrated, end-to-end marketing automation stack. Spending in this area is increasing rapidly, which clearly demonstrates strong intent and growing interest among businesses. However, this surge in investment does not necessarily reflect the true size of the market comprised of companies that have fully and deeply integrated these processes end-to-end. In other words, while more organizations are allocating budget to these capabilities, only a subset are truly embedding them at the core of their operations.
Jure Jesenovec
Director CE Solution Practice Lead
European reports place software spend around 1.6 to 1.9 billion USD in 2024– 2025 with roughly 15% compound growth expected through 2030, but that tells us more about budgets than maturity [1]. At the same time, Microsoft has made real-time journeys the path forward, nudging late adopters to upgrade [2]. Picture a market of pilots and partial rollouts, with few programs that truly unify identity, consent, capture, and orchestration into one operating model. The companies below are moving in that direction. The upside for most of the market is still huge.
Boštjan Kralj
CE Team lead
When Microsoft announced the move from Outbound to Real-time, we had questions. Would customers read it as a forced upgrade or as a chance to change how they engage? Some features were not yet fully available at the time, which raised some doubts. One client asked the practical question everyone was thinking: is real time the same thing, just more expensive? A simple idea settled in across our team and our clients: a customer journey is alive only when it responds in the moment. Everything else is scheduling. We decided to test it in practice instead of arguing in theory.
What is real-time marketing? Real-time marketing uses triggers from live customer or business actions to launch or steer a journey as it happens. The next step and channel are chosen based on verified identity and valid consent, so responses are timely and relevant.
The Journeys
Over the past two years we helped four European organizations move from schedule-driven outbound marketing solutions to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys in real time. Each came from a different world. One is a mobility and roadside association that serves consumers, prospects, and insurance partners. Another is a precision motor manufacturer that sells to OEM engineering and procurement. A third is a beverage producer and distributor that works closely with distributors and the HoReCa network. The fourth is a company from the retail sector that connects physical stores, online sales, and a loyalty program. We do not name the companies. Their stories matter more than labels. The lessons and the path toward higher digital maturity are a privilege we walked together. Our findings are meant to help them grow further and to sharpen the preparation of others now taking a similar path.
Stories from the field
The morning the system answered back
In the consumer mobility setting there was a dedicated product owner who arrived with a notebook full of verbs: notify, route, confirm, learn. The team waited for real-time journeys rather than simply replicating outbound routines. Triggers became the grammar of their new language. A member submitted a form, a profile changed state, a service milestone completed, and the journey did something people could feel. A message reached the member when it mattered. An internal alert reached the right desk while the request was still warm. A segment adjusted before the next touch. Identity collisions appeared early because one person could show up as a loyalty holder, a website user, and an insured driver in partner data. The team treated this as the first design problem. They unified profiles, defined matching and merging rules, and wrote down how consent would work across channels [4]. The result was not flashy, but a quiet confidence. Foundations were strong enough that value appeared quickly and kept appearing as more use cases went live.
A platform without a point of view
A manufacturer approached the transition as if it were a hardware refresh. The brief sounded reasonable. Install the new thing, migrate the old sends, keep the calendar. We did those steps. Click through rates looked familiar. Dashboards looked tidy. The business felt no change. The weeks after go-live revealed what had been missing. There was no single person accountable for what customers should experience when they did specific things. When that leader later left, the program slowed to maintenance speed. The lesson we took forward is simple: a platform will not invent an operating model. Journeys act with purpose only when someone defines the purpose in verbs. Real-time features change little until they are wired to events that matter and to outcomes that sales and service recognize.
The newsletter that never changed its mind
In a trade-focused environment, marketing automation had long been a professional email pipe. Announcements left the building cleanly, subscribers were tidy, and reports were fine. Real-time arrived as a technical upgrade. The organization approved the minimum, took the new module, and expected the magic to come from the label. It did not. The newsletter did what it always did, only slightly faster. When we revisited the program months later, we did not ask for new content. We asked for the moments that truly mattered for distributors and retail buyers, and for what should happen inside the organization when those moments occurred. That conversation finally changed sequencing. We also removed parallel form paths that had grown over time. Two submission routes meant journeys could not hear consistently. Once capture and consent were handled in one place, triggers began to mean something again.
Counting the people before speaking to them
The fourth client, a retailer and publisher, began with a straight question: “How many unique customers do we truly serve?” No one could answer with confidence. We did not begin with journeys. We began with profiles. The team connected sources from stores, web, loyalty, and service, then agreed on matching rules and a view of truth. When unification ran, the number became clear, and so did the gaps. Consent was inconsistent across systems and needed a better design. Segments became reliable for the first time. Only after that groundwork did we orchestrate early journeys. The distinction was evident. Communications were received in a manner that appeared more personalised, attributable to the completion of the profile [4].
What the stories share
When you step back, the common thread is not a feature but a sequence: identity first, consent next, capture in one path, and only then triggers that point to business events rather than the calendar. The rest is orchestration. Research calls this real-time interaction management: recognizing context, deciding the next best experience, and coordinating it across channels. In practice, that means a sales alert tied to the last action, a service flow that starts when a threshold is crossed, or a nurture that adapts when someone chooses differently.
Beneath it all is a technical heartbeat. Triggers start and steer journeys. Consent is handled differently from outbound and must be carried forward. Unification merges sources into one profile with deduplication and match rules. None of it is glamorous, but it is the scaffolding that makes real-time journeys work.
What finally moved the needle
In the mobility project, the first win was small but telling. A defensive-driving booking triggered a preparation email the very next day. It was opened, saved, and followed by a welcome call that added a new driver to the household profile. No steering committee required. Only clean data, clear consent, and a journey responding in real time.
At the manufacturer, progress came slower. For weeks little changed until a product owner sat down with sales and wrote three verbs on the board: signal, qualify, escalate. Two journeys were rebuilt around those actions, speeding follow-up and turning “better leads” from theory into deals backed by context.
In the beverage company, the breakthrough was cultural. Retiring a hidden second form handler made submissions consistent. Segmentation stabilized, consent gained nuance, and teams could finally send order-critical updates without noise, and marketing only where people had asked for it.
For the retailer and publisher, the decisive moment was a number. Unification revealed how many unique customers they really served. Trust grew across departments, segments performed better, and leadership finally had one view of the customer. From there, personalization felt earned, not assumed.
What consistently worked
- Name a vision owner and set shared KPIs.
Anchor real-time work to business measures such as pipeline velocity, sales follow-up speed, qualified intent captured, and service resolution — not opens and clicks. Real-time journeys only pay off when they are owned like a product with clear outcomes. - Start with foundations: identity and consent
Unify profiles across sources. Define dedupe and match rules. Design real-time consent with channel-level clarity before scaling journeys. This prevents one-to-many identity collisions and all-or-nothing consent traps. - Pilot two or three trigger-based journeys that involve sales
Make triggers the heartbeat. For example, high-intent content engagement that raises a contextual sales alert, an event registration that triggers a personalized follow up with product fit branching, or a service milestone that proposes a next best offer when consent allows. - Instrument forms once and retire parallel paths
Use one route for capture, enrichment, validation, and consent updates so journeys hear every signal consistently. This is where many programs stall. - Coach the mindset change
Move teams from monthly mailings to in-moment interactions and next best experience thinking. Framing the program with the real-time interaction management lens keeps it cross functional and board relevant [3]. - Iterate in value sprints
Work in cycles of six to eight weeks. Test hypothesis, customise, evaluate, scale. Keep the backlog framed in business verbs, not software objects.
A pragmatic transition approach
Step 1: Assess (2-3 weeks)
Inventory sources and identity collisions. Map consent posture. List real moments to act on. Locate parallel capture paths and data latency chokepoints. Prioritize two journeys with clear commercial outcomes.
Step 2: Prove (6-8 weeks)
Stand up unified profiles and real-time consent. Implement the two journeys with triggers. Integrate sales alerts with context such as account, last action, asset, and segment.
Step 3: Scale (quarterly)
Add simple decisioning for next best experience. Retire outbound assets as advised. Report on business KPIs, not vanity metrics.
Closing thought
The gap is rarely in the tools. It is in timing, context, and ownership. Real-time journeys close that gap when identity and consent are clear.
Sources
1. Grand View Research estimates European MA revenue at about 1.56 billion USD in 2024 with a 15.6% CAGR through 2030; Mordor Intelligence projects 1.89 billion USD in 2025 and 3.58 billion USD by 2030.
2. Microsoft transition stance. New Customer Insights – Journeys customers use real-time journeys by default; outbound is being retired, with timelines and FAQs published. (Microsoft Learn)
3. Forrester on Real-Time Interaction Management. RTIM is defined as the ability to recognize context, decide the next best experience, and coordinate it across channels.
4. Customer Insights – Data unification. Microsoft Learn guidance on creating unified profiles through deduplication and match rules, providing one reliable view of each customer.