Unlocking business growth with customer journey management
Consumers are in the driver’s seat when it comes to brand experiences. They decide when, where and how they want to engage with a brand. And whether interacting with the brand online or in-person, they expect a personalized, seamless and connected experience every time. Delivering this experience requires that brands truly understand their customers and their journeys throughout the lifetime of the relationship.
This “strategic approach to understanding an individual’s need in the moment, to meet the need as early as possible, and in the most convenient manner for the individual” is defined as customer journey management by Winterberry Group.
Seventy-seven percent of the brands are investing in customer journey management disciplines and technologies, but few are excelling at it. In fact, only 17 percent of brands are delivering consistent experiences across the entire journey. What does it take to deliver a truly unique brand experience across channels and at scale for every individual customer? We worked with Winterberry Group on research exploring this very topic — what it takes for brands to excel at customer journey management.
Completing the puzzle
Successful customer journey management is complex. A brand needs the right data, technology and analytics to understand customer needs. It also requires automated decisioning, orchestration, and omnichannel engagement to determine the next best action and deliver a truly individualized experience. How do these components come together to create a complete puzzle? Let’s take a look:
- A complete picture of the customer — Delivering an exceptional customer experience starts with understanding the customer. Brands need to combine disparate data from siloed sources into a single up-to-date view of the customer. Data including demographic (such as name, age or interests), behavioral like previous call center or website interactions, and transactional data including past purchases and refunds must be integrated and standardized to surface actionable insights.
- Journey analytics — an analytics application allows brands to understand customer actions in the past and predict future actions by using predictive and predictive analytics and machine learning to identify patterns based on past behaviors. Automation is essential to performing this type of analysis at scale.
- Decisioning and orchestration — With an updated, unified customer profile and an analytics application to analyze the data and surface insights in place, brands can begin to activate the insights and deliver the next best interaction. To make this scalable, brands need to embrace decisioning applications that enable brands to determine the next-best action based on available insights and business objectives, including determining the right content, offer or channel to engage — activating decisions at the right moment of engagement.
- Holistic approach to engagement — Customer engagement shouldn’t be centered on a single strategy, delivery channel, or touchpoint in the journey. It should be a culmination of every single interaction across the entire journey and a combination of batch campaigns, trigger campaigns, and real-time messaging.
- Measurement leads to improvement — Whether customer journey management is working for a brand is all in the numbers. Measuring the success of customer journey management efforts is complex because customer journeys are complex. The numerous touchpoints, both online and in-person, make successful measurement and reporting challenging. Brands need a combination of direct metrics and modeled approaches to truly understand the efficacy of their efforts and to continue to optimize the experience.
Bringing customer journey management to life
Customer journey management is complicated, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Having the right technology that can grow as a brand grows its customer journey management efforts is critical. Adobe Journey Optimizer, natively built on Adobe Experience Platform, is an agile and scalable application for creating and delivering personalized, connected, and timely customer experiences across any app, channel or device.
Learn more about customer journey management here and more about how Adobe Journey Optimizer can make it possible here.