Are You Sharing the Customer Journey Across Your Org?

“Marketing can no longer be one department among many. It is the epicenter of this transformation.”

This was how our fearless leader of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, Brad Rencher, kicked off our Adobe Summit earlier this year. Across all industries, organizations have had to pivot in how they approach their business. As Brad also mentioned, “Digital experiences are changing how consumers interact with brands in profound ways.” While digital has lead to well-known disruption in some industries (think Uber, AirBnB, Spotify, etc.) it’s still forcing other industries to re-think their customer experience (finally I can pay my rent and utilities online!).

This big shift in how companies view customer experience gets to this first idea that what we used to think of as “marketing” is now becoming the responsibility of nearly every department. If you are in the operations department of a processed foods company you have to understand the impact of missed deliveries on customer satisfaction or see how increased shipping costs can slow demand. If you are in the finance department of a university, you know that changes in how you accept payment or integrating ways to partner with student-friendly loan companies can greatly improve how students view their experience.

With organizations becoming more data driven, the key to this change is in giving these other departments access to this information so they can discover these insights on their own. Analytics is core to enabling this shift in behavior.

The Customer Journey

Understanding the customer journey is where this process starts. The amount of places for customers to interact with you seems to be changing daily, yet many customers still look at this data in a siloed manner. Customers expect ubiquity from brand experiences, so as mentioned above, your organization should also start thinking in this way. You may be tired of hearing this narrative, but the number one response as noted in an Econsultancy survey last year on the most effective tools to enhance Customer Lifetime Value (CLV or CLTV) today is ‘a single customer view.’

When you start sharing the customer journey among your organization you can also start to evangelize marketing principles such as CLV. Many times we think of customers through the context of one conversion/purchase/sign-up, but of course we want a customer for life. That is why companies with high switching costs, such as mobile carriers or cable providers, will spend so much to get a new customer, or will give you a deal if you threaten to cancel. Books have been written on this topic, but I wanted to highlight CLV in how Adobe Analytics can help you.

Case Study: Using NPS to Impact the Cross-Channel Journey

A great example of this in action is from a large multinational telecommunications customer of Adobe Analytics that wanted to look at how they could help impact their customer service. They wanted to measure basic Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer satisfaction across the main touchpoints in their customer journey, but also wanted a way to analyze this more holistically so that they could take action on the insights, rather than keeping each channel separate. They cared about several key “journeys” ranging from paying your bill to upgrading, help and support.

They deployed a basic survey asking questions about how likely customers were to recommend a product across their website, SMS, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), call center and their physical locations. I think I would rather deal with sitting still waiting for my Netflix to buffer than figure out how to align all the different objectives and channels in this scenario. But this customer integrated all of their survey data in the data workbench feature of Adobe Analytics Premium and was able to see the different customer journey across different channels. They were able to combine quantitative and qualitative data to categorize and sort the data allowing them to identify and attribute the root causes of the dissatisfaction.

The analytics team provided this information to the product managers and other key stakeholders who were then able to address key issues. This helped to develop a customer experience-focused culture in their organization. There are many other ways they can take this analysis even further. Tying an increase in satisfaction to customer value and ROI can quantify the impact of this analysis and justify resources. Integrating CLV into data workbench in Adobe Analytics, we can understand how higher-value or lower-value user journeys differ. In addition, you could load in cost data for your call center to prove cost savings with call deflection.

To highlight the role that analytics has in marketing going beyond marketing, this is the first entry of a three-part series on how Adobe Analytics is approaching this challenge and why we are in a unique position to help solve it. Stay tuned! My next post will discuss the “data problem” and how to overcome siloes of data, and the final post will address “putting it all together” and how to make customer analytics work for you.