Why deep customer insight is at the heart of better experiences & revenue growth
Customer Journey Management is the process of discovering and optimizing your customers’ journeys, to improve customer experience and achieve positive business outcomes.
Today’s CX practitioners are employing Customer Journey Management to discover and optimize their customers’ journeys, and they’re seeing conclusive business results. The domain is comprised of traditional journey mapping, Journey Analytics and Journey Orchestration. In short, customers’ journeys need to be understood before they can be managed, and Journey Analytics makes this possible. The resultant insights allow for optimization of journeys for CX and business success.
In our post What is Customer Journey Management, and is it Important?, we shared that McKinsey & Co. have reported that more than half of customer interactions happen during multi-event, multi-channel journeys1, and that journey-centricity is 30% more strongly correlated with your important CX metrics.
At inQuba we’ve seen a doubling in customer conversion and a boost in common CX metrics when journey approaches are implemented. Today’s leading businesses are turning to dynamic, data-driven journey management to improve customer experience, increase customer conversion, grow acquisition, ensure customer retention, accelerate real-time customer insight, build customer lifetime value, and drive revenue growth.
So, what is this analytics aspect of journey management all about?
What is Customer Journey Analytics?
Customer Journey Analytics is the process and science of exposing and understanding customers’ actual, real-time behavior across customer touchpoints, at scale. Powered by omni-channel behavioral and transactional data, advanced analytical techniques reveal customer segments and the journeys (and obstacles) that customers experience, rather than the conceptual ones that we may map out.
Cross-channel journey insights support customer experience strategies and are the most effective path to understanding and transforming journeys and helping customers reach their goals. Leading businesses use journey analytics to improve in-journey experiences, predict customer behavior, and achieve business goals such as reducing customer churn.
Why are leading businesses using it?
Your interactions with customers don’t happen in a vacuum. They’re part of an intricate web of experiences, goals, touchpoints and emotions, and every interaction is influenced by context and the previous one. Customer feedback tells part of the story, and journey insights provide a window into actual behavior and related sentiment. This is the visibility that most businesses don’t have.
Customer experience is hard. Forrester has reported that 81% of brands have reported stagnant growth from their CX investment in recent years2. In contrast, journey methods result in measurable business outcomes, such as a doubling in customer conversion and a boost in CX metrics. It’s an important move towards aligning the business around an end-to-end view of the customers’ journey which spans experiences and functions.
The benefits of customer journey analytics are not limited to insight. They are critical for the next step – journey orchestration. Having identified customers’ real paths, obstacles and sentiment, the business can optimize journeys through real-time interventions that guide customers towards their goals. Data-driven decisions require data-driven insight.
Journey Analytics versus Mapping
Customer journey mapping is often the initial step a business takes when improving customer experience and customer satisfaction. Journey maps are static visualizations, typically designed by stakeholders in a boardroom, showing the customers’ paths across touchpoints as they attempt to reach their goals. Importantly, it defines customer goals, optimal paths and areas of responsibility. In isolation, though, journey mapping stops short of being actionable, as discussed in our blog The 4 Reasons Your Journey Maps Are Failing You. They’re an important start but a blunt tool on their own.
In contrast, journey analytics succeeds in turning static maps into real-world, data-driven journey visualizations. So, what insight is available?
Journey Analytics – what’s in the box?
CX professionals mention “not being able to tap into rich consumer insights” as their largest CX challenge in 2022 and beyond3. These are some of the insights offered by Journey Analytics.
1. Journey discovery
Where are your customers going, and are they getting there?
Using data from multiple sources, Journey Analytics allows the CX practitioner to easily visualise customers’ actual journeys, identify which customers are reaching their goals, and identify what’s stopping those that aren’t getting there. What experiences and journeys are our customers having in reality? Which obstacles or sequences are leading to drop offs? Without visibility of real journeys these questions remain unanswered.
2. Understanding value delivery
What do your customers value, are they getting it, and how are they feeling?
Does your business understand the extent to which your customers perceive value as having been delivered? Today’s customers are mobile and omni-channel and value different things, which will differ by cohort. Dynamic mechanisms must be used to measure experiences and collect structured and unstructured customer feedback at every step of their journeys, in the moment. Natural language processing will identify themes and sentiment associated with journeys and cohorts. Whether they value something experiential, symbolic, economic or functional, this insight adds a layer that helps explain the why behind segment behavior.
2. Understanding value delivery
What do your customers value, are they getting it, and how are they feeling?
Does your business understand the extent to which your customers perceive value as having been delivered? Today’s customers are mobile and omni-channel and value different things, which will differ by cohort. Dynamic mechanisms must be used to measure experiences and collect structured and unstructured customer feedback at every step of their journeys, in the moment. Natural language processing will identify themes and sentiment associated with journeys and cohorts. Whether they value something experiential, symbolic, economic or functional, this insight adds a layer that helps explain the why behind segment behavior.
3. Goal achievement, and the reasons for success and failure
Why are your customers dropping away, who are they, and what’s important to them?
Having understood the what and the why of customer behavior, you need to look at whether or not goals are actually being achieved, and why. Are certain applicants dropping off due to the poor functional value of the service, or is it just high effort? Are client segments terminating due to brand factors, or is it a channel failure? How can we help them?
Journey Analytics at every step of the customer journey
Customer acquisition
Customer acquisitionCustomer journeys (especially digital ones) often start when prospects click an ad or arrive through search. This is part of the discovery process and the prospects have a degree of intent. They’ll go about consuming the content on your site that will help them to make a decision, including watching videos, downloading resources or even making contact. This end-to-end digital journey is visualized for the CX and marketing teams who will want to reduce friction and guide prospects through to conversion.
Customer onboarding (activation)
Registration isn’t enough – you want customers to activate their solutions and become engaged users on a sticky product. Journey insights allow the business to promote customer engagement, often achieved through self-serve options, calculators and forums. This will guide customers to a place where they can confidently consider more and hopefully become a promoter.
Servicing
Unfortunately, customer service failures along the journey are a reality. Being able to identify it in real time, or even predict it, allows for prompt communication and recovery. Communication during these times is key to keeping affected customers updated and providing confidence that it’s being addressed. Confidence. Deep journey insights empower the business to engage contextually and guide customer emotion.
Some of these use cases have included journey optimization which will be analysed in the next part of this series.
About inQuba Journey Management
Customer Journey Management is the laser technology of CX. Lasers offer targeting precision for specific use cases, and users have granular control. Similarly, managing customer journeys allows you to focus on the specific – cohorts, behaviors and use cases. Every systematic action is for someone, not everyone.
While CX results are flattening, inQuba Journey Management, which includes Journey Analytics and Journey Orchestration, is helping businesses to visualize actual journeys, understand their emotion, dynamically clear their paths, nudge them in the right direction and double customer conversion.
inQuba Journey Management is laser-focused CX.
We’d love to understand your business challenges better, and discuss how Journey Management can transform your customers’ experiences and business growth.
Read the full series on Customer Journey Management now.
