The Automation Murders: Who Killed the Customer Journey

Update: 2025-12-13

Description

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

Opening – The Body of the Journey
- A high-intent cart that never gets a save
- How silence becomes the event
Interrogations
- Static Segments: The Historian Arrives Late
- Manual Processes: The Witness Who Blinks
- Real-Time Journeys: The Sprinter Without Brakes
Motive – Why Triggers Are the New Gold
- Triggers as agreements, not switches
- Guardrails that turn speed into safety
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
The Partnership – CI + PA + Fabric + Copilot
- How each role (profiler, scene control, enforcer, lab, deputy) fits together
Reenactment – Detect, Decide, Intervene
- A step-by-step walkthrough of a “save” with full lineage
Forensic Playbook & Pitfalls
- 6-step audit to debug your own tenant
- Classic case breakers: bad data, loops, missing error handling, over-automation
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.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/m365-show-podcast--6704921/support.

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