Who Killed the Customer Journey

In this episode, we treat your customer journey like a crime scene. A high-intent cart goes quiet. A churn score spikes and nobody moves. Consent says “yes,” policy says “no,” and the customer disappears into silence. This isn’t a tooling problem—it’s a control problem. We walk through the “death” of a journey step by step: how signals go missing, how over-automation collides, how consent lattices get ignored, and why teams monitor sends but never page on silence. Then we build the forensic system that doesn’t blink: guarded triggers, consent with precedence, idempotency keys, cooling windows, and a single evidence chain you can actually defend. If you care about real-time journeys, marketing automation, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Power Automate, Fabric, and Copilot—and you’re tired of guessing why journeys failed—this episode is your case file. What You’ll Learn

• How customer journeys really “die”
  • Why most failures don’t show up as errors, but as quiet non-events
  • Why teams monitor sends, not non-sends against eligible customers
• The three main suspects killing your journeys
  • Static segments – “the historian” that always arrives late
  • Manual processes – “the witness who blinks” at decisive moments
  • Real-time journeys – “the sprinter without brakes” that loops and collides
• Why over-automation is more dangerous than under-automation
  • Too many flows competing for the same signal
  • Caps rewarding the first to shout, not the most urgent case
  • Connector budgets burned on noise instead of risk and recovery
• Triggers as the new gold
  • How to design high-value, real-time triggers (abandoned cart, churn, CSAT, VIP drift)
  • Fingerprints vs vague rules: value + dwell + recency + consent + caps
  • Why every trigger needs an explicit evaluation artifact and idempotency key
• Consent done right (and wrong)
  • Person vs brand vs purpose vs region: the consent lattice
  • How “EmailAllowed = true” and brand-level blocks quietly contradict each other
  • Designing lawful fallback trees: email → SMS → push → human → respectful “no send”
• Building brakes into real-time journeys
  • Cooling windows, re-entry rules, loop detection, and self-write shielding
  • Debouncing triggers and preventing mass-casualty loops
  • Respectful retry and backoff instead of infinite “try again” storms
• The unit that actually saves customers
  • Customer Insights as the profiler (identity, timelines, signals)
  • Journeys in CI as scene control (triggers, guardrails, choreography)
  • Power Automate as the enforcer (actions, retries, compensations)
  • Fabric as the lab (lineage, contracts, monitors for silence and surge)
  • Copilot as the deputy (draft, simulate, summarize—humans approve)
• Forensic implementation playbook (6-step audit)
  • Mapping real business intents to precise triggers and fingerprints
  • Installing the consent lattice and suppression hierarchy as single sources of truth
  • Adding cooling, idempotency, backoff, and right-of-way across channels
  • Wiring adaptive cards, SLAs, and escalation to real humans with clocks
  • Proving every save with end-to-end lineage instead of vibes

Who This Episode Is For

• Marketing operations & lifecycle teams running multi-channel journeys
• CRM & martech leaders working with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Power Automate, Fabric, Copilot
• Product & growth teams designing real-time interventions (abandoned cart, churn, CSAT)
• Data, analytics, and platform owners responsible for governance, consent, and auditability

Episode Structure

1. Opening – The Body of the Journey
   • A high-intent cart that never gets a save
   • How silence becomes the event
2. Interrogations
   • Static Segments: The Historian Arrives Late
   • Manual Processes: The Witness Who Blinks
   • Real-Time Journeys: The Sprinter Without Brakes
3. Motive – Why Triggers Are the New Gold
   • Triggers as agreements, not switches
   • Guardrails that turn speed into safety
4. Case Files (Live Forensics)
   • Case 01: The Abandoned Cart That Bled Out
   • Case 02: The Churn Risk Nobody Heard
   • Case 03: The Deadly Consent Misconfiguration
   • Case 04: The Trigger Loop Mass Casualty Event
5. The Partnership – CI + PA + Fabric + Copilot
   • How each role (profiler, scene control, enforcer, lab, deputy) fits together
6. Reenactment – Detect, Decide, Intervene
   • A step-by-step walkthrough of a “save” with full lineage
7. Forensic Playbook & Pitfalls
   • 6-step audit to debug your own tenant
   • Classic case breakers: bad data, loops, missing error handling, over-automation
8. The Twist & The Verdict
   • Why over-automation kills more journeys than under-automation
   • The law of controlled, evidenced decisions

Call to Action

• Subscribe to the show so you don’t miss the next episode on self-healing triggers and auto-pausing loops.
• Grab the Forensic Playbook checklist (linked in the show notes) to run this 6-step audit on your own journeys.
• Want to see this done live? Join the upcoming tenant audit session, where we walk through real case files and rebuild the chain—on screen, end-to-end.

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