Gain Insights from Customer Journey Analysis to Build Superior Experiences

July 13, 2015

When released later this year, IBM Journey Analytics will be the first solution allowing you to visualize and analyze the paths your customers take, over time and across channels. We unveiled Journey Analytics to great excitement at IBM Amplify 2015 and, as we move toward launch, I want to continue to share details about what makes this new solution so compelling.

In my last post, I discussed why gaining insight into the complete customer journey is so important. Today, I’ll share how this learning can be turned into superior experiences for your customers and, in my next post, I’ll explain how improved business results is what you can expect from implementing customer journey analytics.

Customer-centric experience design is critical

Most companies now recognize the high importance of focusing on the experience delivered to their customers. In fact, a recent Gartner study revealed 89% of CMOs plan to compete primarily on customer experience by 2016.¹

 And a recent IBM and Econsultancy study revealed that most companies think they’re already doing a good job. The study found 69% of companies say they offer a superior online experience, but 51% of customers who left a company that “failed them” blamed their exits on bad online experiences. The same study found 81% of companies say they have or are close to having a holistic view of their customers, while only 37% of consumers say their favorite retailer understands them.

We have a clear disconnect here. Companies clearly understand the importance of delivering superior experiences and most even think they’re doing a good job, but, in most cases, they are falling short.

Why? Gaining a clear picture of customer behavior and interactions with your brand over time ─ think days, weeks, months, even years ─ and over numerous channels and devices is flat-out difficult. Truly understanding your customers and knowing how to interact with them at each touchpoint requires seeing their entire journey and connecting all the disparate data dots.

Companies striving to do this face the daunting challenge of overcoming their own fragmented organizational structures and siloed software solutions. Pulling all the staff, software and data together to get on the same page and piece together a cohesive, cross-channel view of the customer, over time, is a monumental and costly task. Without everyone being on the same page, it’s no surprise the result is often uneven and disjointed customer experiences.

And, it’s not only a difficult challenge, it’s also an expensive one. In fact, poor customer experiences cost companies $83 billion in lost sales each year in the US alone.²

Craft Compelling Experiences

Cross-departmental and cross-functional communication and collaboration is key to designing meaningful and memorable customer experiences. But, collaboration shouldn’t stop there. Your customers interact with your brand in a variety of ways and partner collaboration and data is also necessary to gain access to the full picture.

Some organizations have made the mistake in the past of trying to gather everything into a single, perfect database before they attempt journey analysis. This simply isn’t realistic and we’ve seen that mindset as a barrier to success in the past. New ways of interacting and building relationships with customers will continue to evolve. How many of you were considering using mobile wallet marketing one year ago?

So, don’t wait. Start right away by prioritizing the parts of the customer journey you believe have the most impact on success and are accessible. Over time, add new elements to your customer journey mapping so your understanding of customer behavior and the paths they travel progressively builds.

IBM Journey Analytics will provide a flexible platform to easily add new data elements into the mix to build a common view of customer journeys. This view, which will provide clear mapping of key customer interactions, will truly bring the journeys of your customers to life, so you can understand customer behavior in context and take the right action at the right time. It will also ensure everyone is on the same page across the organization, without IT assistance or deep domain expertise.

But collaboration doesn’t stop with a common view. IBM Journey Analytics has been designed to work seamlessly with another upcoming solution, IBM Journey Designer. Communication and collaboration features are built in, so marketers and data analysts using Journey Analytics will be able to easily communicate and collaborate with designers and user experience team members using Journey Designer, without leaving the solutions. The insights uncovered in Journey Analytics will enable your organization to jump-start the design process in Journey Designer, so journeys can be crafted specifically to meet the goals you have for your customers and your business.

With Journey Analytics, you will be able to visualize and understand the top paths customers take to a particular outcome, measured in different ways, including the most traveled paths, the paths creating the most revenue and the shortest paths. This will lead to insights about customer behavior. And this learning can then be applied to the design of future customer experiences to help ensure more customers travel on a preferred path.

At the very least, the experience crafted should be consistent and on brand no matter how or when a customer comes in contact with your organization, while unique, compelling experiences can give you the chance to exceed your customers’ expectations.

Next time, I’ll discuss how the superior experiences you build using Journey Analytics will translate into increases in customer lifetime value and other improved business results. In the meantime, watch this video and visit our web page to learn more about IBM Journey Analytics.

Sources:

(1) Gartner, 2014

(2) “IBM Study Points to CMO, Marketer of the Future, as Customer Experiences Remain Top Priority.” May 21, 2013.