Customer experience (CX) has rapidly become the key brand differentiator for many brands, replacing product and price. More than half of consumers (58%) say customer service is more important than price, and 58% would pay more to receive great customer service.1 Despite this, CX quality is declining and improving CX is challenging.
Organizations require a cohesive CX strategy that incorporates appropriate tools to break down organizational silos and focus on customers’ needs. This guide will provide insights based on the latest research to help you understand the customer experience technology landscape and tips to get started selecting the right solution to meet your goals.
FACTORS TO CONSIDER WHEN EVALUATING CX SOLUTIONS
1
Where are the limitations within my current CX tech stack?
2
What are the business outcomes I am looking to achieve?
3
How can a customer journey management solution deliver these outcomes?
4
What should I look for in a Customer Journey Management solution?
5
How can my business get started quickly with a new solution?
1. Where Are the Limitations Within My Current CX Tech Stack?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
Customer Feedback Management Software
Campaign Management System
Description
What it does well:
A CRM stores and manages customer data. A CRM automates sales outreach to facilitate customer relationships at certain touchpoints.
Manages some data:
Contact/ Demographic information
Purchase records
Customer service tickets
Details of consumed products and services
Does not deliver an end-to-end customer experience for all customer touchpoints
Where it falls short:
Doesn’t provide context needed to understand customer behavior or intent
Unable to determine the right communications to send customers who are on multiple, simultaneous journeys
These systems collect and analyze customer feedback. Examples include surveys, VoC programs and more to measure customer satisfaction, engagement and expectations.
Helps brands get to know their customers
Survey responses provide quick snapshots of needs and preferences
Provides valuable insight to add to a customer data profile
These systems aid in planning, executing and tracking marketing campaigns. This software includes tools for creating and sending email campaigns, managing social media posts, and tracking website traffic.
Efficiently sends sales-related messages to large groups of people
Can increase brand awareness, generate leads, and drive sales
Cannot measure all interactions with a brand
CX surveys have a low reach and response rate
Responses do not always indicate root cause of the negative rating sentiment
Organizations have invested significantly in various technologies related to customer engagement. According to 217 global CX leaders who are using a customer engagement solution, many (70%) are using customer relationship management (CRM) software, live chat tools (66%) and/or mobile apps (62%) as their primary means of handling CX 2. Yet less than half (41%) of those leaders noted improvements in either customer satisfaction or increased sales, and only 46% reported better customer retention.2 This means a customer engagement solution that handles a single facet of the customer experience is not sufficient to improve CX.
Focuses mainly on sales and not what comes afterwards
Doesn’t use real-time customer data profiling to send messages
Cannot detect context and intent, or predict a customer’s needs
Customer Data Platform (CDP)
A CDP is a software platform that collects, integrates, and manages customer data from various sources— such as a CRM, contact center systems, billing, browsing history, and electronic medical records—to create a unified profile for every customer.
Integrates data from multiple sources
Resolves customer identities
Creates unified customer profiles
Necessary for removing data silos within an organization
Doesn’t send messages in realtime based on current behavior
Does not provide the context needed to understand customer behavior
Cannot make journey-centric decisions and determine the right communications to send
2. What Are The Business Outcomes I am Looking to Achieve?
C-suite and senior business leaders agree that customer experience is integral to success.2 They realize that new CX initiatives paired with the right tools can add enterprise value. Unifying behind CX transforms businesses from the top-down in four key ways. If your organization holds these business values, consider the correlating key performance indicators to measure CX and identify friction points in your program.
Increase Revenue
Improve Loyalty and Retention
Increase Margins by Reducing Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) Air-Traffic Controlled Promotions / Advertising
Decrease Operational Expenses
Streamlined Automation of Digital Experiences
Decrease Employee Turnover
Reduce Need for Capital
Revenue Assurance around the Bill Experiences
Average Order Value
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Conversion Rate
Time to payment
Return on Ad Spend
Cost Per Conversion
Click-Through Rates
Customer Acquisition cost
Digital Containment Rate
First Response Time
Average Handling Time
Customer Effort Score
Cart and/or Product Abandonment Rate
Call Threshold Rate
Attrition Rate
Involuntary Turnover Rate
Day Sales Outstanding (DSO)
Cost to Collect
Accounts receivable as Percentage of Revenue
Siloed data, systems, rules, content, plans, and decisions lead to disconnected experiences that make omnichannel personalization impossible to deliver.
Popular customer engagement tools that lack alignment aren’t enough to improve CX. Across industries, less than half of the CX leaders who are using a one-dimensional customer engagement solution reported improvements in customer retention (46%), customer satisfaction (41%) and sales/revenue (41%). 3
Keep reading to find out how customer journey management can deliver your sought after business outcomes.
3. Unlock the Potential of Customer Journey Management (CJM)
Customer journey management refers to using real-time customer data to analyze current behavior, predict future behavior and send the right messages at the right time via the customer’s preferred communication channel.5 An effective CJM leads customers to optimal outcomes that enhance business results and the customer experience.
It’s not just another platform to add to your tech stack. It connects the solutions you have and makes them work together—and better.
Customer Feedback Management
Track and measure every interaction with your brand across all channels
Understand customer needs, desires and expectations
Identify interactions that had the largest impact on customer behavior
Customer Data Platforms
Active updating of customer profiles
Real-time dynamic segmentation
Pre-integrated interaction triggers
Execution of the next best journey action
Customer Relationship Management Software
Maintain an updated, contextual profile for each customer
Use decisioning logic and rules to evaluate the need for intervention and next best actions
Engage with relevant messages across all channels
Campaign Management Systems
Improved advertisement targeting
Increased personalization through every stage of the life cycle
Measurement and decisioning around customer intent to drive real-time communications
Customer journey management software contains customer journey analytics, which combines big data and visualization to help you understand how your journeys are performing. Without it, you’ll still be dealing with data silos by manually consolidating and processing data. Journey orchestration connects to databases and the customer-facing systems listed above to deliver seamless and personalized experiences across any channel, in real time.
4. What Should I Look for in a Customer Journey Management Solution?
An organization’s journeys performance is strongly correlated with customer satisfaction—even more so than its performance on touchpoints. Improve business outcomes like churn, revenue and repeat purchase by using a tool that allows you to measure and orchestrate journeys. To make your customer journey program a reality, start by mapping out the critical components.
To supercharge your customer experience initiative, your next solution should offer these core capabilities, as defined by Forrester4:
Core Capabilities
Journey design and mapping
Deliver multi-channel, coordinated communications throughout multiple, simultaneous customer journeys
Make real-time decisions about what message to send based on customer preferences and needs
Data fusion and journey analytics
Integrate with other systems (e.g., CRM, electronic health records)
Segment customers and non-customers in real time based on behavioral and other customer attributes
Create and maintain a comprehensive customer data profile across departments and channels to use for real-time decision making
Decisioning and journey orchestration
Use journey analytics to analyze channel performance, identify pain points and track customer behaviors and patterns across channels
Track and listen to prospects and customers as they move from interaction to interaction and transition from unknown to known, and manage them as an evolving holistic profile
Journey testing and optimizations
Identify and measure business metrics and track the performance of CX tools against those metrics
Apply ongoing test and learn models with adaptive A/B multivariate learning
As you evaluate solutions…
Reliability, Scalability and Performance
Ask These Questions And Look for this in Responses
How long does implementation take? Connectors seamlessly integrate the new journey management system with any existing systems, limiting implementation to roughly 90 days.
A library of industry-specific pre-built journeys reduces up-front work by your IT team.
Security and Compliance
How qualified is this vendor to execute a service roll-out of this magnitude?
Is the solution cloud-based or on-premises?
What privacy and security standards do you currently have in place to protect data, enable access, and secure communication?
Describe the solution’s cloud architecture, infrastructure and deployment options.
Look for a vendor with extensive experience completing thousands of projects for clients from various industries, including yours.
A journey management vendor should offer a SaaS solution deployed in a cloud instance that fits your need, regardless of region.
The vendor should maintain robust policies, processes and controls for their information systems to support security, risk management and regulatory requirements. Data privacy and protection should be prioritized, adhering to commitments outlined in their Code of Conduct. Compliance includes identifying collected data, its usage, access rights, and data retention and destruction schedules. Data custodians ensure proper data destruction and maintain records of the process.
Your organization's cloud configuration will dictate your specific needs. Seek a solution that aligns with your requirements for scale, global availability, architecture and deployment preferences.
Journey Management
Software
Qualifications
Does your platform provide any AI/ML features that automatically optimize journeys or refine journey steps or audience types or both?
How does your system support non-linear, dynamic and adaptive journeys so teams can determine preferred journeys and identify a customer's actual journey to reach a goal?
The solution should offer AI-powered, real-time decisioning capabilities with built-in predictive modeling to ensure optimal journey orchestrations, including built-in A/B testing spanning multiple channels.
Look for a journey management vendor that has capabilities to understand non-linear customer behavior and which steps were most preferred in reaching the actual goal.
Explain how the tool provides “next best action” functionality. A CJM tool should analyze real-time customer behavior and predict intent to decide which is the next best experience.
Customer Service / Support Describe your levels of technical support. How do you provide technical support and troubleshooting? Include detail about typical response time and SLAs.
What services do you offer to help customers plan for and install your product/solution?
Support teams should be involved in a project from the start. The vendor needs to understand any requirements specific to your business to define and implement the solution. Look for a solution that has an availability service level of at least 99% with support from a 24-hour help desk as well as client services.
Partner with a vendor that has various methodology offerings, including a full-managed service offering, the ability to manage the environment yourself or a hybrid approach to cross-train teams. A library of pre-built journeys specifically for your business should be available to improve the most important touch points with less resources and minimal IT effort required.
5. How Can My Business Get Started Quickly With a New Solution?
1. Evaluate your current customer experience program and tech stack. Consider technology gaps that impact CX listed previously in this guide and how they apply to your business. Demonstrate a need for change by asking questions like:
How aligned is my business today with a clear customer experience management strategy?
Is my organization deriving insight from customer interactions across all channels-digital and physical?
Does my business collect and maintain a complete customer profile?
Are we tracking and measuring customer experience metrics today? How well are we doing?
Is my business continuously engaging with customers to find new improvements in the services, experiences and/or journeys we offer?
Do we track and understand customer journeys across channels so they can achieve an output or outcome via a system?
Are we quantifying and attributing business benefits to customers and journey improvements?
2. Utilizing the answers to these questions, build a business case for investing in a customer journey management solution. Use an ROI calculator to estimate enterprise financial benefits previously listed in this guide. Share relevant use cases from vendors with executive leadership to gain buy-in.
3. Choose a high-impact journey to start achieving quick wins and define a precise implementation vendor with the selected vendor.
Gathering this information may seem daunting. However, CX leaders need to build a business case that demonstrates how the right solution mix will meet stakeholder expectations, address organizational priorities and realize better business results.
Ready for the next steps? CSG Xponent Ignite
is Here to Help
Getting started can be challenging. It’s time and labor intensive, but vital. The CSG CX team will work with you to build a business case for improved customer journey management by:
Assessing your organization’s CX maturity
Identifying desired business outcomes
Calculating expected ROI of orchestrating customer journeys
Outline findings in a brief to present to leadership
Not only will we share industry-specific best practices to give you a running head start and speed up implementation--we’ll also provide the technology to make it happen. CSG Xponent Ignite provides pre-built customer journeys for four key industries: financial services, healthcare, retail and telecommunications. The foundation of Xponent Ignite is CSG Xponent--our awardwinning, industry-leading customer journey management solution that combines a customer data platform with best-inclass journey orchestration and journey analytics.
REMEMBER: YOU DON’T NEED TO BOIL THE OCEAN. YOU CAN START WITH ONE JOURNEY USE CASE, PROVE OUT THE VALUE; AND EXPAND YOUR PROGRAM FROM THERE!
About CSG
CSG empowers companies to build unforgettable experiences, making it easier for people and businesses to connect with, use and pay for the services they value most. Our customer experience, billing and payments solutions help companies of any size make money and make a difference. With our SaaS solutions, company leaders can take control of their future, and tap into guidance along the way from our more than 5k-strong experienced global team. Want to learn more about how to be a change maker and industry shaper like our 1,000-plus clients?
Visit csgi.com to learn more.
1 “58% of Customers Will Pay More For Better Customer Service,” forbes.com
2 “Customer Engagement Solutions Drive Transformational CX and EX Outcomes,” forrester.com
3 “The State Of Customer Experience Teams, 2022,” forrester.com
4 “The Forrester WaveTM: Journey Orchestration Platforms, Q2 2022,” forrester.com
