The Changing Customer Journey

THE CHANGING CUSTOMER JOURNEY 8 Ways to Meet Customers Where They Are

The Changing Customer Journey: An Edify eBook

CUSTOMER JOURNEY. It's certainly as buzzy a phrase as there is at the moment. The customer is as kingly as they've ever been, armed with 24/7 access and the power to elevate or nearly erase a brand's reputation with a few screen taps. The goalpost for brands keeps moving farther away and there is no choice but to catch up. Brands must now push the boundaries of business communications to undreamed-of heights in order to create true customer delight. But first, brands must understand the totality of the customer journey.

73% of companies are at risk of failing to meet customer expectations.

Optimove points out, “The journey from ‘random consumer’ to ‘your customer’ is important, but the journey from ‘your customer’ to ‘someone else's customer’ must be studied closely.”

This is the challenge the majority of companies have faced for all time — attracting customers is one thing, keeping them is another.

Herein lies both the challenge and opportunity of our time, as the chasm between what customers want and what brands are willing or able to deliver is wider than ever. Omdia’s ICT Enterprise Insights survey asked respondents about their progression and status toward enabling omnichannel customer engagement. The study shows that 73% of companies are at risk of failing to meet customers’ expectations. That fact is staggering and should scare every company looking to stay in business.

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73% AT RISK

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0% COMPLETE ©2020 Omdia

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WELL ADVANCED

IN PROGRESS

EARLY STAGES

NOT STARTED 2017

NOT RELEVANT 2018

2019

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The Changing Customer Journey: An Edify eBook

CLOSING THE CHASM Considering the customer journey starts by contextualizing the customer and the complete span of interactions they have with your brand, ask yourself: who are they? How do they choose to interact with you? Do these interactions generally go well, or not so much?

The truth is revealed through data analytics and can inform the customer experience you create -- those memorable moments which define how they feel about your brand. There is much potential to learn from customers about what they want in order to do better business with them. Simply observing their journey and what their choices indicate can be so insightful. Seeing their complexity and, their lack of predictability, as a rich and dynamic matrix of interactions that form an interconnected journey, can enable businesses to unify, analyze, orchestrate, and measure what’s really going on instead of trying to cram customers into a limited set of predefined personas.

Specifically, in a true omnichannel environment (which is what every business should aspire to become), you need intelligent ways to recognize and engage customers wherever and however they come to you. Then, most importantly, you must remove every friction and obstacle from their journey, from brand awareness to first purchase to loyal evangelism. The new complex, connected customer journey demands that technology innovators and brands see the big picture and the trends while simultaneously zooming in to treat each customer as a unique individual.

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The new complex, connected customer journey demands that technology innovators and brands see the big picture and trends while simultaneously zooming in to treat each customer as a unique individual.

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The Changing Customer Journey: An Edify eBook

THE HOW Well that all sounds like a solid plan, but making it happen involves some heavy lifting. We now have the tools for enabling truly unique and personalized communications with each customer. Meeting them in real-time at their point of need with exactly what they didn’t even know they were looking for is indeed possible. This is something every customer service director has dreamed of for years; the combination of processing power and machine learning has made it a reality when blended with the right application of the human touch. Here’s how you get there...

1. GATHER & APPEND THE DATA

Data is the raw material that fuels understanding. Using data to generate insight is what matters in being proactive about customer service: moving from descriptive to prescriptive to predictive insight will truly illuminate the way forward. And that means bringing all of your data together intelligently, from your customer and sales behavior to your product development road map to your deliberative qualitative and UX research. How else can you meet them exactly where they will be, with exactly what they need? Is your data complete? Is it in one place? Is it easily accessible to your team?

It must be.

2. ANALYZE WHAT YOU'VE GOT

What does the data tell you about who your customers are? What patterns emerge? What do different customers have in common?

Is it needs-based? Interest-based? Preference-based? Who are your biggest spenders? Smallest?

Moving from descriptive to prescriptive to predicative insight will truly illuminate the way forward. edify.cx

3. SEGMENT BASED ON THE ANALYSIS

Organize customers into groups and build your CX strategy around what you know about them. The goal is to begin by speaking directly and personally to each group — and ultimately each individual — from a place of knowledge and empathy for where they are in their buying process.

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The Changing Customer Journey: An Edify eBook

4. DETERMINE THE RIGHT CHANNELS

When you know your customers and where they are in their buying cycles and in their lifecycle with your brand, you can be effective at developing content that feels personal and relevant. Who gets what content at what stage? When is marketing in charge? When does your sales team step in? When is support in order? What does a prospect see versus a customer versus a longtime customer versus an annoyed customer? Having answers to these questions will go a long way toward creating the kind of customer satisfaction that is difficult for a competitor to replicate.

Your contact center technology should

5. THINK THROUGH CONTENT & PROCESS

When you know your customers and where they are in their buying cycles and in their lifecycle with your brand, you can be effective at developing content that feels personal and relevant. Who gets what content at what stage? When is marketing in charge? When does your sales team step in? When is support in order? What does a prospect see versus a customer versus a longtime customer versus an annoyed customer? Having answers to these questions will go a long way toward creating the kind of customer satisfaction that is difficult for a competitor to replicate.

show agents & leadership the full omnichannel journey of each customer with interaction details, recordings, & context.

THE CUSTOMER LIFECYCLE: FROM AWARENESS TO LOYALTY

Customers are unpredictable. In the new digital age, linear conversion paths and funnels are long gone.

AWARENESS Customers learn of the brand through advertising, word of mouth, events, etc.

EVALUATION Marketing & sales must engage with hyper-personalized product information

CONSIDERATION Brands proactively engage at the right time & place with the right offers & content

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POST PRODUCT SUPPORT Personalized service, training, or repairs

PURCHASE Sales transactions are completed

NURTURING & ADVOCACY Engage customers with rewards program & next-best actions

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The Changing Customer Journey: An Edify eBook

When you listen to your people, trust their insights, and value their opinions, the combination of analytics and instinct will be incredibly powerful.

6. TRACK THE JOURNEY

Watch what prospects and customers do at every stage so you can understand if the journey you have mapped is indeed what they are looking for. If not, seeing what triggers certain behaviors or deviations from expected outcomes is invaluable. Ideally, your contact center technology should show agents and leadership the full, omnichannel journey of each customer with interaction details, recordings, and context.

7. ASK THEM HOW IT'S GOING

The most valuable information often comes from the people you most want to please.

Weaving the voice of the customer (VoC) into your CX strategy can help shortcut what might otherwise be painful missteps. It is so easy now with the right technology to ask customers directly: how are we doing? Are you satisfied? They’re usually happy to provide insight into where they are, what holes exist in the journey for them, and how they think you could be doing better. (Plus, you’d much rather ask them and have them answer you on your terms than learn about it out loud on social media.) Data-driven decisions are essential, and require a degree of humility, a willingness to ask people what they want and respond effectively, to over-deliver, and strive for continual improvement.

8. LOOP IN YOUR FRONTLINE

Remember, your employees are customers, too. Among the myriad people with whom they interact daily, they’re your customers as well, and arguably the most critical part of creating the connected customer journey you envision. Your team deserves rich, rewarding work experiences rooted in meaningful activities set within a context they understand.

To accomplish this, they need an intelligent synthesis of all the analytics, visualized in one single pane of glass. Then they can make real-time decisions that meet customers where they are. When you listen to your people, trust their insights, and value their opinions, the combination of analytics and instinct will be incredibly powerful. As the public face and voice of your brand, their empathy, judgment, intrinsic motivation, and pride in their work will shine through to customers.

Your team deserves rich, rewarding work experiences rooted in meaningful activities set within a context they understand. edify.cx

Isn’t the whole objective of customer service to put ourselves in the customer's shoes and walk awhile? We must break away from the siloed approach to using data and think more strategically — embracing interconnectedness will enable the bigger picture to emerge.

Businesses seen as responsive, relevant, and committed to customers will win their hearts and minds (along with their loyalty). The future belongs to the brands who can connect the human touch with technology and data to offer an ongoing, low-effort, digital experience — recognizing the customer journey as a continuous and holistic single interaction: that is, to see it as the customer sees it.

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Edify connects businesses with customers and employees with each other, making business communications as easy as personal ones. Its flagship product, Edify Huddle CX, unites contact center (CCaaS), unified communications (UCaaS), and real-time communications platform (CPaaS/API) functionality in a cloud-native solution that lets users move seamlessly among channels within one conversation, just as we do on our phones. Edify removes all the risk once associated with moving to the cloud by delivering global availability, real-time redundancy, no-waste pricing, and a 100% SLA uptime guarantee. Edify is a Google Chrome Enterprise Recommended partner for the contact center. Learn more at edify.cx.

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