Getting the customer journey right can be a source of competitive advantage, revenue uplift, an uptick in net promoter score (NPS) or customer satisfaction score (CSAT) and so much more.
This guide will take you through two of the key considerations, examples and practical steps you can take to gain competitive advantage from an integrated customer journey and effective CX management, with a focus on two key areas:
- Data
- Consistency
Key consideration 1: Data
Many successful brands start their customer journey discussions with data – and rightly so – as it represents the foundation of what you’re trying to achieve with the customer journey.
Innovation around data from a customer journey perspective falls into two main areas: a single customer view, and targetted cross-channel content.
1. A single customer view
This has long been the holy grail of delivering a personalised experience to customers. Now with the convergence of CRM, direct marketing, digital advertising and even ecommerce and customer service, the single customer view is not just richer, but is fast becoming the cornerstone of a successful customer journey.
For example, Kriti Kapoor, who leads HP’s global social customer care team, says the integration of social, service and CRM: “Gives our social agents a comprehensive view of the customer before responding. They can instantly see the customer’s history, their warranty information, other products they own, previous issues, open cases and more. The more data our agents have at their fingertips, the better the service they provide across channels.”
Key tactics to consider:
- Focus on customer data first, then enrich
Your CRM system, or wherever you hold your customer data, is where you will learn most about your customers and get most value – focus on this as the starting point and then move onto enriching it further with purchase data, social data, behavioural data and so on.
- Think beyond marketing
Why advertise or market to a frustrated, unhappy customer who is in the midst of a customer service issue? If your organisation is focusing strategically on the customer journey, then consider how customer loyalty and service data can influence how you engage customers and ensure you are keeping them loyal.
- Trust is more critical than ever
What data you collect and what you do with it should be top of the agenda for any marketer. With customers’ ability to shift loyalty to another brand with the click of a button, and with the continuing importance of transparency about what data is being used, it is paramount to be clear with your customers about how and why you are using certain data.
It’s a fair exchange of value – they expect a great experience if they are to unveil information about themselves to you. Use data wisely and within the constraints in which you operate.
2. Targeted cross-channel content
Digital, social and mobile content will become a critical part of the complete customer journey in the near future as investment in social and mobile increases. This is fuelled by a rise in new social channels, where engagement and user volume is high (think Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.) and where the maturity of identity-based platforms such as Facebook and Google is aligning with marketing tech and CRM.
Marketers need to combine their data, social and content capabilities to get more from these new platforms.
Key tactics to consider:
- Combining anonymous and customer data to enhance customer acquisition and customer engagement
By using first-party data, such as customer email addresses, and combining it with anonymous behavioural data to deliver highly targeted content, marketers can achieve considerably higher engagement.
- Enriching digital marketing by combining email marketing with social content
Email remains the ROI workhorse of most digital marketing efforts today, but as the customer journey becomes more connected, we are seeing innovative brands increase engagement by combining the content shown in an email with that shown on social media by delivering it consistently across these channels.
Key consideration 2: Consistency
If a customer can research, register, buy, complain and buy again all on a single mobile device – and all within a matter of minutes – then certainly the consistency of message, experience and promise is what keeps it all together and makes the journey feel unified in their eyes.
What’s more, customer expectation is increasing exponentially as the channels of communication between customer and brand grow and become more intimate, direct and real-time.
As such, consistency is a critical discipline for marketers focusing on the customer journey.
Cross-channel consistency
Brands are increasingly finding ways to hold personal dialogues with their customers, and the rise in brands using messaging apps such as WhatsApp to do this, at least in the B2C space for the time being, is a case in point. Combine that with the more ‘traditional’ digital channels of email, mobile apps and social, and you’ve got a highly complex mix to deal with.
Key considerations in this area include:
- Getting email marketing right first: learn, then scale.
Email marketing continues to be the best-performing channel for marketers. What you can learn from email marketing in terms of message, scale, response rates, engagement and more puts you in good stead for scaling up to mobile messaging, social, and any other channel to engage the customer. Use email as your learning ground and go scale.
In practice:
Sky has implemented SMS on top of email marketing as an additional channel to engage customers around feedback surveys for its technicians. It sends over 100,000 surveys
per day and since implementing SMS has seen a 30 per cent increase in response rates.
- Thinking of your service centre and your sales organisation as channels
As digital marketers and channel managers, we tend to focus our efforts on traditional and emerging marketing channels, but we don’t often think of our service centre colleagues as marketing channels too. Imagine the impact of ensuring every follow-up email from a resolved service issue automatically incorporated personalised content or offers based on current marketing campaigns, sent automatically by your service rep.
- Consistency at scale
As channels increase, the number of campaigns grow and the need to respond at speed to customers accelerates.
Accordingly, scaling your digital marketing presence needs to be one of your top priorities when investing in technology.
Here’s an effective way to think about consistency at scale:
Ensure technology can support your growth
On ‘Cyber Monday’, Salesforce customers sent 2.3 billion emails in one day alone – a 44 per cent increase versus 2014 and a 77 per cent increase on the monthly average. Of course, this is the busiest time of the year for many brands, but these figures also highlight the considerable growth in outbound communications with customers.
When you are investing in technology to support and scale your customer journey, ensure it can also support your plans for customer acquisition across the organisation.
- Automate where you can
As digital marketing technology becomes more sophisticated, many of the operational and manual tasks a digital marketer once had to do can now be automated, leaving the marketer to concentrate on marketing.
It’s therefore wise to always consider (and action) the day-to-day elements of your marketing organisation that could be automated – from social campaigns and email campaigns to mobile app messaging and ads.
Key takeaways
- Getting the customer journey right is absolutely key to gaining a competitive advantage.
- Use data to develop a single view of the customer, focusing first on your CRM system, then customer service data.
- Remember your customers’ need to trust you and how you use their data.
- Collaboration within the marketing department and other teams will allow you to master the customer journey.
- The best collaboration needs to happen on social channels, with a focus on effective social customer service.
- Consistency is more important than ever make sure everything about the customer journey is as consistent as possible, before thinking about how you will achieve consistency at scale.
- Combine your data, social and content capabilities to produce consistent cross-channel content that will enhance the customer journey.
