It is no longer a secret that todays’ digital world is in the eye of the storm of privacy and data transformation, with the rise of the consumer’s privacy awareness, along with their greater demand for personalization of their journey. Offering the best, and relevant customer experience is crucial for attracting and retaining the customers; consequently, drives larger interactions with the brand, thus revenue, loyalty, and advocacy.
Understanding customer journey through a data-built structure influence how we design practices and reshape the users’ experience in real-time. It is the mechanism of assessing and monitoring the outcomes, to improve the flow.
The customer journey cycle is a chain that cannot be cut, they influence each other, so let us dig into every step.
1- Connect data:
The customer funnel is the process that starts and ends with data. It is elementary to design a journey where brands can collect, process, and decode different dimensions of data.
At this stage, the organizations’ business intelligence’s role is to identify the data type, quality, level of granularity, and segmentation, to move to the next phase.
2- Define the customer journey:
After collecting the organizations’ “big – consumer – data”, it is time to determine the ideal customer flow structure, grasp data into insights that fuel our digital strategies and tactics. At this stage, there are no room for bias interpretations, and sentiments. Understanding what is working and what’s not is the key when it comes to defining customer behavior.
3- Design a test model and contact strategy
it is all about how the company’s strategy to contact its customers and prospects, connecting the marketing objective to the customer relationship, by defining first the business objectives: primary and secondary KPIs: Conversions from prospects, cross/up-sell, scale new customer, customer retention and advocacy. To avoid complicating the design, we must be customer-centric, build an audience based on first- and third-party data, understand the user behavior, persona, and the lifecycle stage, to act in their interest.
The strategy that balances between marketing, technology, and customer needs, will genuinely lead to innovation, and disruption.
4- Turn strategy into action and measurable observations
In todays’ media mix, no single company has a complete customer journey. Tracking and understanding the customer journey is very challenging especially with the scale, and the uniqueness of today’s interactions, and models. Some businesses rely on their CRM, while others’ competitive advantage at digital, and some count on loyalty.
5- Use Real-Time decision making and optimization
First, decide on the platforms ingest real-time events, signals, interactions, and historical insights. Adopt sophisticated artificial intelligence, and machine learning algorithm to deliver the best practice.
Simplifying the stages of customer journeys into three levels to orchestrate the best experience:
Single channel: the “micro-journey” of a single channel’s performance. I.e., cart abandoners or checkout droppers.
Multichannel: it is the compound of multiple channels delivering a personalized experience. Scaling new customers for a newly launched product through push notifications, and digital media to connect the brand with its potential customers; the “macro-journey”.
Omnichannel: consist of all type of interactions driven from different channels, and touchpoints in real-time. A combination of pull and push tactics orchestration to deliver personalization, and a unique customer experience. Enhancing customer relationships, where optimization of experience across digital is crucial.
6- Measurement and Analysis
Considering measurement in the last of a business checklist leads to costly results. A successful customer journey requires ongoing reporting and analysis and continual improvement on the customer experience throughout their journey on the tactical and strategic levels. In today’s dynamic, a new sense of urgency is pushing businesses to rethink fundamental customer interaction modes. The rise of the transformation of data and first-party data massively shifting customer experiences and digital activities.
The process is turning into a more complex one and newer models’ integration are required. Businesses are expected to make faster decisions within this tight data lifetime.
