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Every business thinks they know their customers. But do they really? Do they know what customers are looking for when they visit different channels, how they make purchases, what drives them away? When interacting with a brand, customers generally know what they want, and the journey it takes them to get there gives businesses insights into how to best meet customers where they are.
There was a lot of speculation about how the COVID-19 pandemic would change buyer behavior, but CEO of Alterian Bob Hale doesn’t think the pandemic affected behaviors as much as people might have expected. “At the end of the day, we as consumers have our ways of researching, purchasing and championing the things we buy. What the pandemic affected was the pace of change,” Hale said. “Which wasn’t a problem for those businesses who already have a digital presence. But those businesses who are slower to innovate — who might have had a five-year digital transformation plan in place — had to greatly accelerate their timelines.”
What has changed is how much familiarity customers now have with stellar customer experiences. And their expectations will only accelerate. The businesses that adapted early were able to make mistakes, but that’s no longer the case. The pressure is on businesses to enable great journeys, the first time and every time thereafter. This can be achieved by delivering the individualized experience customers demand using customer journey orchestration.
For an in-depth discussion about customer journey orchestration and where businesses go wrong, CMSWire spoke with Hale about what needs to happen internally to successfully implement customer journey orchestration technology.
Instead of Forcing Journeys, Treat Customers as Individuals
Delivering great customer journeys means not treating all customers the same. “One of the biggest mistakes companies make is not approaching every customer from their own unique perspective and experience,” Hale said. “Too often, businesses try to force customers into specific journeys or channels. That didn’t work in the past and it doesn’t work now.”
Customer journey orchestration is about looking for the breaks, the roadblocks and the friction points where customers drop out of a journey and taking steps to alleviate those pain points. “Stop trying to optimize the channel and start trying to optimize the experience — because your customers are going to jump channels in ways you didn’t prepare for,” Hale said.
Don’t Sacrifice Experience on the Altar of Efficiency
Making the journey efficient instead of focusing on the experience is another area where businesses fall down when trying to improve customer journeys. “Businesses might try and automate specific processes, but while they could reduce costs they run the risk of delivering bad customer experience, and getting negative CSAT scores as a result,” Hale said. “Improving the experience through efficiency is inside-out thinking, and doesn’t take into account that customers often want experiences more than they want efficient journeys, which could come off as feeling impersonal and not unique to them at all.”
To avoid this common mistake, Hale recommends using cross-functional teams to work through journey orchestration challenges together. “Operations are great at finding efficient solutions, but those might not always be the best from a CSAT perspective,” Hale said. “While marketing excels at personalization, it might be focused on customer acquisition and lack insight into other channels where your customers can be found. It’s best when CX groups are combined. You need marketing’s understanding of the customer and the IT/operations understanding of all the touch points in your ecosystem to reach all customers with the right message at the right time.”
Understanding Where Customer Journey Orchestration Fits
Although it can help you discover the biggest pain points in your customer’s journey, customer journey orchestration technology is fairly new, and businesses might not be aware of it. And when seeing the technology in action for the first time, it’s normal to have questions about its capabilities and benefits. “When I demonstrate customer journey orchestration to someone for the first time, I usually get a lot of questions afterward,” Hale said. “There’s so much that’s possible our potential customers don’t know where to start. Often they ask if they need to replace any of their other systems. Will they need a new CMS? Will they need another system?”
Hale continued. “The answer is you need all of those systems. But one of the key benefits of Journey Orchestration is how it delivers impact now, with your current ecosystem, without needing to replace everything first. Given this, you can start small, with a single use case or a drop-off point and use customer journey orchestration to solve for it. This way, you can see where journey orchestration can deliver value without replacing your entire system before you start solving problems.”
“One mistake companies can make when trying journey orchestration out for the first time is making a big bang or trying to fix everything at once,” Hale continued. “Not only is that challenging, but it might cause a user experience shift that customers won’t like. So, begin with a specific task or metric in mind and solve for that. Once you’ve accomplished the first measurable goal, move on to the next one. This is how businesses succeed with customer journey orchestration.”
Conclusion
With customer expectations higher than ever before, it’s an opportunity for brands to beat the competition. And according to Hale, your competitors aren’t as far ahead as you might think. “Unless you’re an outlier in your industry, few companies are really blowing customer experience out of the water,” Hale said.
Ultimately, businesses don’t control the customer journey — customers do. It’s up to businesses to optimize journeys by finding and fixing pain points and barriers for all customers to find their own way, no matter the time, place or channel.
Learn how Alterian can optimize your customer journey orchestration at alterian.com.
