Evolve CX with Customer Journey Mapping and Analytics

Consumers use countless digital channels to reach out to companies. And they expect simplicity and speed from customer service interactions. Yet, most customer journeys are fragmented and frustrating. Providing consumers with a great customer experience (CX) has become more complex.

The best way to meet all their channel preferences is to be channel-agnostic. To do this, companies need to orchestrate experiences to create a customer journey that moves seamlessly across digital and voice channels. And it should help move customers closer to a resolution — faster.

Experience orchestration bridges silos and eliminates obstacles. It enables companies to provide fluid, personalized journeys across channels — at scale and in real time.

Going Beyond Customer Journey Mapping

A customer journey is a set of interactions a customer has with your business to complete a task. These can include evaluating, onboarding, getting support, or purchasing a product or service.

Buying journeys start long before users visit your website. And service and support experiences continue after a purchase is made. Journey maps let you better understand customers — following buyers across channels and touchpoints.

Data-driven journey maps are used to design customer-centric processes. Ultimately, they streamline customer interactions and improve customer engagement and brand loyalty.

Your first step is to create maps for a subset of journeys; focus on those that drive high transaction costs or high incremental customer value. These are a great starting point for designing personalized customer experiences. And these maps can serve as the foundation for programs that optimize the entire customer journey.

But there are some caveats with journey mapping. Different customers, even those with the same buyer persona type, move along at their own unique pace. Journey mapping assumes the same cadence for all customers and therefore misses out on opportunities to interact with individual customers on a one-to-one basis through personalized engagement.

Customer journey analytics, which triggers real-time engagement, helps nurture customers with different cadences along the journey.

In today’s always-on and always-connected world, customer journeys are also interconnected — jumping multiple times across online and offline channels. And they even intertwine with other journeys.

For instance, a customer journey to resolve an issue, if handled well, could result in a cross-sell of a new product or an up-sell into a higher value plan. Journey maps don’t help you discover such real-world, unscripted customer behaviors.

Customer journey analytics can help you solve these problems by revealing the wide variety of real paths that customers actually take across channels and over time.

With CX journey mapping, customer experience leaders can envision the best pathways. However, customer journey analytics takes it even further — providing insight into customers’ actual behaviors. It also allows you to identify customer pain points and opportunities in existing processes.

This powerful combination not only enables companies to improve CX, but to also increase alignment across the enterprise. Plus, successful journeys can shape customer behavior, reduce customer effort, improve efficiency and build customer loyalty.

Aim for Continuous Journey Optimization

Optimizing customer journeys doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Customer journeys need to be consistently orchestrated, monitored and enhanced to deliver measurable results. This requires a robust, yet agile CX platform that supports all channels and touchpoints with true omnichannel routing.

A truly effective customer journey mapping process requires software that will enable you to do the following.

• Recognize customer intent and prior experiences to ensure that every interaction helps customers progress seamlessly toward achieving their goals.
• Resolve issues proactively to maximize self-service rates, eliminate unnecessary channel switching and reduce call volume.
• Use intent and prior behavior to route customers to the next-best action or best agent. And it provides a visual representation of key actions customers have already taken.

5 Keys to Understand the Customer Journey

When considering options for improving your customer experience strategy, look for a CX platform that includes both CX mapping software and journey analytics. You should also look for a product or service that excels in these five areas.

1. Keep segments fresh with journey-driven audience activation

Customer behavior is fluid; preferences change. Rather than using static customer segmentation, choose journey mapping software that supports switching to journey-driven audiences.

This will enable you to orchestrate more relevant experiences that better reflect individual customer intent and prior interactions and behaviors. Plus, tailoring customer segments by attributes, time or behavior eliminates poor experiences and improves the customer journey.

2. Extend personalization with experience orchestration

AI-powered experience orchestration goes beyond traditional personalization methods. Modern customer journey mapping software helps leverage customer data from every channel, source and system. This means each interaction reflects a customer’s entire experience with an organization. As a result, every interaction is highly personalized because it’s based on specific customer personas, objectives and preferences.

3. Improve the employee experience with predictive contact routing

Choose journey mapping software that supports routing calls to the right agent based on customer goals and past customer interactions. It should also give employees easy access to relevant customer information. As such, employees can resolve customer issues more quickly and efficiently — and provide a more empathetic experience.

4. Enhance the experience across all touchpoints

Optimizing the experience in one channel without considering its impact on other channels, such as web, phone, email and social media, can lead to unintended consequences. For example, one company that wants to reduce talk time might increase bookings for service technicians — a more expensive interaction. It’s vital to track the entire experience with your company across channels and time.

Customer journey mapping software should integrate easily with existing applications. This could include campaign automation and web experience management, as well as contact center and workflow platforms. This means every email, text, chat and phone call is informed by the customer’s prior experience and goals.

5. Test any changes before implementing them

Simulate journey improvements and determine the optimal outcome before making changes to interactions or processes. Run A/B tests to evaluate potential improvements without compromising your customer experience. A robust customer journey mapping software enables companies to adapt personalization logic, and compare journeys and potential impact. They can also rapidly visualize results at scale.

Each stage of a customer journey map process gives companies the ability to quickly resolve issues. They can also identify opportunities to increase customer satisfaction. And, ultimately, this improves organizational alignment.

Today, customer experience leaders, sales reps and marketing and operations teams use experience orchestration to deliver the personalized experiences customers expect. These types of customer journeys are seamless — and they set them apart from their competitors while improving business outcomes.