And How Customer Journey Optimization Provides the Visibility You Need
According to Gartner, 89% of businesses expect to compete primarily on the basis of customer experience, up sharply from just a few years ago. And yet, most businesses have yet to achieve the visibility into their customer’s journey that would enable them to set their brand apart. When you have visibility, you are empowered to optimize customer journeys, and climb the ladder from laggard to best-in-class:
- The beginner has a minimal understanding of customer journeys, perhaps mapping some of them out offline. Useful data is strewn across multiple sources and repositories, inhibiting efforts to formulate a complete view of the customer. Analyzing data requires a considerable amount of effort.
- For those making progress, data might remain siloed, but can be analyzed after interactions occur. This lag time between action and visibility makes it difficult to personalize the customer experience across different channels, and inhibits operationalizing and measuring the impact of process changes. You might have rudimentary dashboards with which to operate.
- Achieving optimization entails complete visualization of the end-to-end journey, on both individual and aggregate levels. You can identify customer journeys that encounter high effort, and high dissatisfaction. You can prioritize activities geared towards improving the overall experience, as well as predict customer intent on the basis of both current and prior interactions. Voice of the customer (VOC) data complements customer journeys to create a holistic view of their experience. Typically, the optimized customer journey produces high CSAT scores, high Net Promote Scores (NPS®) and increased customer loyalty.
Ask yourself this…
Visibility is most helpful when you know exactly what you’re looking for, and when it comes to identifying which factors will generate the greatest results from your customer experience efforts, I would propose looking at these twelve metrics:
- How many customers are contacting you each month?
- How many customer journeys are there each month?
- How many channels are they using to engage with your brand?
- How many customers contacted you solely via the retail/in-person channel?
- What percentage of your customers contacted you 5+ times in a month?
- How many voice calls did your most active customer make?
- How do you measure interactive voice response (IVR) containment?
- How many customers are transferred to a second (or third, or fourth, etc.) agent?
- What is your web containment rate?
- What is your real customer effort score?
- What does it cost you to resolve a technical issue?
- What does it cost you to acquire each customer?
Coupled with IVR optimization and real-time personalization, customer journey optimization helps businesses identify sources of high customer effort and low self-service, resulting in an improved overall customer experience and lower costs associated with customer service. With customer journey optimization, you can:
- Connect disparate customer interaction sources into a single, consolidated journey.
- Perform root-cause analysis.
- Gain insights more quickly, and measure improvements continually.
- Leverage powerful analytics to decipher cross-channel insights, and share your findings across the organization.
7 million reasons
One NICE client, a European-based telecommunications provider, faced a number of challenges in their organization, challenges that were draining resources and allowing opportunities for superior customer experiences pass them by. There was no visibility into what was driving web-to-voice calls, repeat voice interactions and the impact of retail contacts on the overall customer experience.
Through customer journey optimization, the company mapped customer journeys across voice, IVR, web, mobile, chat and retail channels. Customer relationship management (CRM) and VOC survey data was included. The application analyzed 4.6 million journeys and 12 million contacts, with contact reasons and customer attributed enabling deeper analysis.
As a result, the organization identified opportunities to reduce over 300,000 calls annually from web-to-contact center journeys, over one million calls from repeat voice calls and transfers, and over 10,000 calls from retail-to-contact center journeys, effectively moving 10% of its billing calls to self-service mechanisms for a return on investment of $7 million. That’s in addition to improved CSAT scores, on account of improved transfer paths for the customer.
Customer journey optimization offers critical visibility into your customers’ experiences, and delivers the insights you need to ensure your brand stands out from the competition.
Watch our on-demand webinar, “Know Thy Customer: Transforming Insight into Effective CX Strategy,” and learn how you can use customer insights to ensure long-term success from your customer experience program.