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The world isn’t what it once was. This isn’t hyperbolic; global uncertainty means businesses face a host of challenges that hinder them from either planning for the future or predicting future customer demand.
Yet some things never change when it comes to customers. Chief among them is the impact of customer experience (CX) on loyalty and long-term retention. Delivering good customer service and nurturing good relationships are some of the top brand loyalty drivers among consumers, according to a recent survey. If businesses can deliver the best CX possible, they’ll be better positioned to both attract new customers and retain current ones.
A new eBook by Alterian explores how customer journey analytics and journey orchestration deliver powerful insights and improvements to the customer experience. These tools do so in a cost-effective way, making them critical tools for attracting, engaging and retaining customers.
Do You Know the True Cost of Poor Customer Journeys?
To optimize the customer experience, you first need to understand every interaction customers have with your brand — from initial discovery to final sale and beyond. All these interactions in the customer journey should be as easy as possible and feel both relevant and personalized to the customer. Brand loyalty happens when customers feel heard, respected and connected to your brand. The more you encourage this connection, the more likely you are to develop customers for life.
The opposite is also true. Customers with negative experiences can drop out of their journey at any time — particularly if they’re frustrated with bad CX. According to a recent report, a quarter of surveyed consumers stopped buying from a business in the past year — and poor customer journeys was one factor driving them away. Losing customers before they can make a purchase can add up over time.
Calculating the cost of poor customer journeys through customer journey analytics software will help you see where customers are dropping off and which stages your business needs to focus on to keep them around. Identifying these pain points will enable you to address them, which can reduce churn, improve customer satisfaction and ultimately drive revenue.
How Customer Journey Orchestration Can Boost Revenue
Identifying the customer journey points where your customers drop off is only the first step. Once you’ve identified those pain points, it’s time to alleviate them. This is where customer journey orchestration software comes in. Customer journey orchestration lets you personalize experiences for customers, helping them move along the journey toward their ultimate goal.
Through personalization, customer journey orchestration can decrease costs and increase revenue. By treating each customer as an individual, customers will have better success getting the answers to their questions when and where they want. This not only increases the likelihood they’ll make a purchase, but also decreases costs by enabling customers to complete their journey through their channel of choice.
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One such channel is self service. Many customers would rather find answers themselves than have to reach out and ask someone. Through customer journey orchestration, you can direct customers to the right self-service channels, only escalating to higher-cost customer service agents when necessary. And by optimizing self-service, you ensure customers who use that channel are able to resolve their issues as easily as when talking to an agent.
Use AI to Optimize Your Initiatives
The speed of digital transformation and shifting customer expectations means businesses no longer have the luxury of addressing challenges on their own timetable. Reacting to customer pain points in real time is a necessary way to optimize the customer experience. Using customer journey orchestration platforms and customer journey analytics tools is a cost-effective way to gain this insight and improve the customer experience as it happens. Responding to customer journeys in real time increases the likelihood of enabling customers to continue their journey and minimizes drop offs — ultimately driving more value to the business in the form of increased sales and higher brand loyalty (which should drive future sales as customers turn to your brand again and again).
With all the talk surrounding generative AI and its effect on industries, one thing should be clear: AI applied to customer journey orchestration and customer journey analytics isn’t meant to replace CX teams. Rather, these tools give CX teams the insight they need to make better strategic decisions on how best to attract and retain customers.
Conclusion
The need to deliver cost-effective solutions to CX challenges is more important than ever, in these uncertain economic times. Leaders recognize the importance of understanding the customer journey, but they need all the help they can get to minimize customer drop offs and increase brand loyalty.
Using AI-powered customer journey analytics and customer journey orchestration tools is how businesses will get there. These tools can deliver insights and actions in real time, minimizing customer pain points as they move through the customer journey. In an age where every advantage counts and customers prize feeling connected to a brand, businesses need every edge to attract, engage and retain customers for life.
To learn more, read Using Cost-Effective Journey Orchestration to Gain the Competitive Advantage at alterian.com.