Driving customer journey improvements in real time

We are often asked for examples of how companies can achieve Holistic CX and what are some of the tools that can bring the organisation together.

Customer Journey mapping has been part of the CX practitioner’s toolkit for many years and increasingly we are seeing organisations re-aligning their focus around priority journeys in order to better serve their customers. Primary journey mapping insights are generally delivered as static ‘laminates’ of the business processes in their current state. Done well this can represent a strategic watershed moment for an organisation as it aligns teams and structures with the implications of greater customer centricity. To actually make this part of ongoing management and decision-making activities, teams typically then focus on these priority journeys and pain points by building dashboards to measure success. These may include a variety of lead and lag metrics as well as key outcome variables such as churn and NPS.

Technology is currently revolutionising this area with the introduction of solutions in business process mining and journey orchestration that can deliver live dashboards. Such dashboards don’t just track outcomes but capture every step of the journey and can easily flex as processes change over time. This data can also be analysed alongside the VOC (Voice of Customer) feedback that supplies attitudinal and emotional diagnostics to complete the picture. The combination can then be used far more effectively to guide the right decisions to deliver better experiences.

Users describe these systems as operating like an X-ray which gets to the truth of the customer journey. The systems reveal how customers flow through these complex rivers of data, entering and leaving through an ever-increasing range of tributaries and deltas. Unconverted customers can be forgotten in stagnant backwaters where they cannot progress only to re-surface in competitor systems. Being able to pin-point these pools of potential can lead to rapid action that can increase conversion and greatly improve the journey for customers that will go on to be the future of the business and may well make the difference between flat-lining and growth.

What’s more, solutions are increasingly going beyond simply plotting and monitoring the journey to active interventions to encourage consumers down the right pathways to enhance their experience and ultimately drive better conversion, retention or upsell. Orchestration systems can be trained to improve business outcomes based on agreed business rules. Interventions can be triggered in real-time in a variety of business applications including CRMs, apps and websites to dynamically adjust how the business communicates with customers based on their behaviours.

Supplementing the deep-dive analysis of the fundamental mapping work, analysing customer feedback alongside their journey through these corporate processes delivers fresh understanding about how they feel. It provides a commentary on their journey steps and allows us to conduct real-time root cause analysis. Some steps may be slower than we anticipate but are simply part of the way that shoppers operate as they seek confirmation that they are making the right choice by comparing with other options outside the company website. Other steps may be unwieldy and irritate customers as they manoeuvre through cumbersome checks and processing delays. VOC data tells us which interpretation is correct and often diagnoses exactly what has annoyed them. This allows us to target our efforts in the areas that give the greatest benefit to the customer, not just the organisation.

We see these systems as an increasingly important set of tools to achieve Holistic CX and bring the organisation together around a new x-ray vision of their customer journeys that drives better experiences.