Increase Customer Loyalty and Retention by Truly Understanding the Paths They Travel

April 28, 2015

It’s true. Marketers have more tools and technology to interact intelligently with customers and customer data than ever before. However, pulling all the data together, from the multitude of campaigns, interactions, and touchpoints in the customer lifecycle, to achieve a cohesive view and understanding of customer behavior, is a monumental task. Data points from these solutions, when taken in isolation, cannot provide the insight required to deliver superior experiences or lasting relationships with customers.

 An end-to-end view of the customer can provide valuable customer experience insights. By understanding your customers’ journeys over time and across key events, you could identify top performing customer segments and paths. This insight about your top customers and their interactions with various device and channels would reveal specific actions you could take to increase loyalty, retention or other metrics, such as conversion.

For example, analysis may reveal that customers who received a loyalty offer during an online chat session, not only took advantage of the offer at a high rate, but also engaged with the brand more often after that point. Based on that information, the company could consistently introduce online chat offers at key moments in their customers’ lifecycles. By being smart about what to offer and when in the lifecycle, companies can successfully grow positive habits and engagement, create more satisfied, loyal and valuable customers who can become advocates for the organization.

Expanding relationships through loyalty programs with your customers is key to growth. However, your customers are more connected than ever before. They have connection points to your business literally at their fingertips with their phones, tablets and keyboards on an almost 24/7 basis. The rise of mobile usage has dramatically increased just how often they are interacting with you. These trends present great opportunities to win over new customers and keep existing ones, but also present chances to lose your key customers.

It’s paramount to know just where each customer is in the relationship with your brand and to make sure to treat them appropriately. They expect a high-quality, consistent experience across all channels and touchpoints and if you don’t smartly apply customer experience analytics, they will likely become disappointed, frustrated and might look for a better experience somewhere else. Imagine, how upset a customer would be if she was offered a discount on a product she had already purchased at full price? Or, another customer might be put off if you recommend a product that is clearly not in the realm of his interests or taste.

On the other hand, clearly understanding where each customer is in their individual journeys and learning from historical interactions of similar customers can boost retention rates. If you notice a specific interaction that often leads to customer attrition, such as a visit to the support page or a call to the help line you could step in at such a moment and deliver a better experience to make things right. Or, better yet, you can identify a behavior pattern at a particular milestone in the customer lifecycle where action is needed before the customer ever contacts support and take corrective measures.

Speaking of support, it’s important to remember that the customer experience is not limited to phone or in-person interactions with your employees, it encompasses every interaction with your brand assets such as website, live chat, mobile apps or in the physical store.

A clear picture of your customer’s journey over time will highlight possible trouble spots, but can also uncover key moments to surprise and delight them. By truly understanding your customers and analyzing their interactions with your brand over time and across devices and brands, you can design superior experiences to make them feel special and substantially boost loyalty and retention along the way.

Learn more about what’s possible by exploring IBM’s customer lifecycle products designed specifically to provide insight and take action based around key milestone events taking place over time and across devices. IBM Digital Analytics Lifecycle is designed for our IBM Digital Analytics customers and IBM Tealeaf cxLifecycle is available for IBM Tealeaf customers.

And, next month a major new advancement in customer journey analytics will be announced at the IBM Amplify event. Learn more: www.ibm.com/amplify [Note: The link is no longer active.]