The Customer Journey, Stages 3 and 4: Onboarding and Next-Best Action

Wel­come to this fourth arti­cle of my series on the cus­tomer journey.

In Adobe’s recent Econ­sul­tan­cy sur­vey , cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and indi­vid­u­alised data-dri­ven mar­ket­ing topped the list of areas in which finan­cial ser­vices exec­u­tives said they’re best posi­tioned to deliv­er on their 2016 pri­or­i­ties. In oth­er words, the pres­sure to deliv­er per­son­alised jour­neys to every cus­tomer, at scale, serves as a key dri­ver of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion for these companies.

In the first arti­cle of this series, we cov­ered the aware­ness stage of those cus­tomer jour­neys, and explored some ways in which retar­get­ing, along with data from cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment (CRM) plat­forms and off­site sources, can improve adver­tis­ing return on invest­ment (ROI). In the sec­ond arti­cle, we analysed the acqui­si­tion stage, in which datasets from the aware­ness phase can be lever­aged to “close the loop” between off­site and onsite cus­tomer experiences—then we dis­cussed the ways in which cus­tomers fill out forms , effec­tive­ly com­plet­ing the acqui­si­tion process.

This brings us to the next stage of the cus­tomer jour­ney: onboard­ing and next-best action. These two stages are about much more than just upselling across channels—they’re about engag­ing with each cus­tomer on an indi­vid­ual lev­el and estab­lish­ing an ongo­ing rap­port. In fact, the next-best offer isn’t always a sales pitch at all. Some­times it’s sim­ply an offer of help­ful infor­ma­tion, or a down­load of a free ser­vice that the cus­tomer hasn’t yet tak­en advan­tage of.

In every case, though, the goal of these two stages is to move your cus­tomers from ini­tial inter­est to con­crete engage­ment and response.

Con­nec­tiv­i­ty challenges

Back in the aware­ness and acqui­si­tion phas­es, you were still work­ing to fig­ure out who your cus­tomers were—which ad click they came from, what inter­est had dri­ven them to your site, and which land­ing page “recipe” would most effec­tive­ly keep them mov­ing along the path toward a purchase.

By this point in the jour­ney, though, you hope­ful­ly know most—or all—of that infor­ma­tion. Here’s where an opti­mised on-site cus­tomer expe­ri­ence real­ly becomes cru­cial. The first com­po­nent of this opti­mised expe­ri­ence is one-to-one real-time deci­sion­ing, which enables you to deliv­er a series of next-best offers until you find one that converts.

In our Econ­sul­tan­cy sur­vey, 33 per­cent of finan­cial ser­vices exec­u­tives said the inabil­i­ty to com­bine off-site CRM data with on-site cus­tomer behav­iour presents a sig­nif­i­cant hur­dle on the way to deliv­er­ing next-best offers. But this abil­i­ty is cru­cial for a stream­lined cus­tomer jour­ney. For exam­ple, if a cus­tomer comes into a branch loca­tion to dis­cuss a mort­gage then vis­its your web­site, the expe­ri­ence should be tai­lored to reflect the mort­gage con­ver­sa­tion, not the most cur­rent loan offer that is being pushed. Your CRM data should pro­vide a con­text for this visitor’s onsite actions, and should inform dynam­ic con­tent that guides this per­son straight to the most rel­e­vant offers for his or her needs.

Anoth­er com­mon chal­lenge report­ed by our sur­vey respondents—a full 47 per­cent of them, in fact—is the inabil­i­ty to iden­ti­fy the same cus­tomer across mul­ti­ple chan­nels. For exam­ple, you might have a robust pro­file of a par­tic­u­lar cus­tomer from that person’s mobile activ­i­ty. But if you lack the ana­lyt­ics to rec­og­nize indi­vid­ual cus­tomers when they arrive on your site, all that valu­able mobile ana­lyt­ics data goes to waste.

On the cre­ative side, mean­while, many com­pa­nies say they strug­gle with the chal­lenge of cre­at­ing per­son­alised one-to-one mes­sag­ing. Ide­al­ly, all cus­tomers would see their own per­son­alised creative—but imag­ine hand­ing that assign­ment to your design team or agency! This is why it’s key to work with a cre­ative plat­form that enables auto­mat­ed dynam­ic cre­ative delivery.

Mak­ing the offer

Once you’re able to con­nect your onsite cus­tomer with your off­site CRM data—as well as data on that cus­tomer from oth­er channels—and are equipped to deliv­er an opti­mised cre­ative, it’s time to deliv­er the next-best offer, with the help of cross-chan­nel cam­paign man­age­ment. Get this right, and you stand an excel­lent chance of engag­ing and con­vert­ing this cus­tomer right now, on this site visit.

The first step of this inte­grat­ed cam­paign man­age­ment pro­gram is to aggre­gate data sources into a sin­gle, tar­getable ID. This is all about bring­ing data togeth­er, and tools like data man­age­ment plat­forms and cross-chan­nel cam­paign solu­tions can help. These tools enable you to cap­ture onsite cus­tomer data in real time, inte­grate that data with anony­mous cook­ie data, and use looka­like mod­el­ing based on third-par­ty data to iden­ti­fy the seg­ment to which this cus­tomer belongs.

Once you’ve got that tar­getable cus­tomer ID, you’ll be equipped to decide which is the next-best offer for this par­tic­u­lar cus­tomer, giv­en the cur­rent con­text. That means deter­min­ing the customer’s pre­ferred chan­nel, and match­ing the most rel­e­vant mes­sage or offer to that individual’s needs. The only way to accom­plish this at scale is to use machine learn­ing algorithms—or data sci­ence for marketers!

Final­ly, you can assem­ble cre­ative assets tai­lored to the customer’s indi­vid­ual inter­ests and needs, and use those cre­atives to deliv­er coor­di­nat­ed, dynam­ic offers across chan­nels. You want to make sure you are lever­ag­ing the right tools that can do all the heavy lift­ing involved in design­ing per­son­alised cre­atives on the fly, and deliv­er­ing them sequen­tial­ly and con­se­quen­tial­ly on each touch point in a customer’s journey.

With this knowl­edge of who the cus­tomer is and where that indi­vid­ual is in the cus­tomer life­cy­cle, and the abil­i­ty to deliv­er con­tent dynam­i­cal­ly, you ensure a great expe­ri­ence. This might involve the per­fect onboard­ing process that pro­motes the right tools and ser­vices for them over a peri­od of time to max­i­mize their cur­rent prod­ucts, or know­ing which prod­ucts can be cross-sold or upsold to them to com­ple­ment their exist­ing portfolio.

One of the most impor­tant steps, though, and one often over­looked, is mea­sur­ing and report­ing the per­for­mance of each dynam­ic cre­ative and offer, enabling you to go back and opti­mise your mes­sag­ing, deliv­ery, and cre­atives, enhanc­ing your cam­paigns for even more con­ver­sions, bet­ter cross-sell rates, improved reten­tion, and high­er ROI than ever before.

Uni­fied communication

We recent­ly part­nered with AXA Bank, help­ing them to man­age all their email and mobile SMS com­mu­ni­ca­tions with­in one sys­tem, to devel­op a con­sis­tent and cohe­sive cross-chan­nel com­mu­ni­ca­tions effort and to lever­age trans­ac­tion­al mes­sag­ing to engage, upsell, and cross-sell. As a result of this uni­fied com­mu­ni­ca­tion, AXA increased con­ver­sion rates by 5 to 10 per­cent, increased email open rates by 60 to 80 per­cent, and achieved ROI in only 14 months.

We sum up this process with a sim­ple four-word sto­ry: “Lis­ten, pre­dict, assem­ble, deliver”—in oth­er words, bring data from dif­fer­ent sources togeth­er, use algo­rithms to pre­dict which offer to dis­play, assem­ble that offer in real time, then deliv­er it to the cus­tomer via their pre­ferred channel.

In the next arti­cle of this series, I’ll be delv­ing into one of the final stages of the cus­tomer jour­ney: iden­ti­fy­ing and resolv­ing cus­tomer issues (res­o­lu­tion), dri­ving advo­ca­cy and, there­fore, reten­tion. See you there!