How to Build Great Customer Journeys

Make Each Touchpoint a Meaningful Experience

YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE ON A JOURNEY

Every interaction with your company informs the quality of that journey. Do you want great customers? If so, you need to create excellent customer journeys. This means better, more consistent and contextual experiences with enhanced value across all touchpoints. Customers will reward that kind of seamless experience with brand loyalty.

Delivering an exceptional customer journey is about mastering your processes, your data, and how they interact. Unifying your data and aligning it with your business processes connects customer information across business units, breaks down traditional operational silos both internally and from a customer perspective, and enables employees to actively use insight to drive decision-making.

Get Customer Data in the Right Place

Most businesses have customer data spread over multiple departments, with different units using diverse systems to manage that information. Some businesses may have access to a formal CRM platform, while others maintain contact lists in Marketing databases, ERP systems, and spreadsheets.

Having data spread across varied locations creates road bumps in the customer journey. Problems include:

• Clients having to provide redundant information to different business teams.
• Processes stalling as users wait for the data they need to complete a customer interaction.
• Confusion as project decisions aren’t clearly communicated across the business.
• Performance bottlenecks if customers depend on a single stakeholder for communication and cannot interact seamlessly with different users throughout their journey with your business.

Get Customer Data in the Right Place

Creating a common customer record that is shared across your business, and is automatically updated during different customer interactions, ensures a smooth experience for all involved.

Modern business process management (BPM) software solutions serve as an application, data and process hub, letting you connect customer information and interactions across units that are typically siloed.

Few things can be more frustrating than repetitive interactions that don’t drive meaningful progress. Don’t let your customers face that tedium as they interact with your services. Using BPM to unify your data in support of unique customer journeys goes a long way toward protecting your clients from frustration by giving all of your users the right information at the right time.

Avoid Process Confusion

Have you ever called customer service at an organization only to face the royal run-around as representative after representative tells you that something is impossible? You get frustrated and call back another day, only to have a different representative tell you that the problem will be easy to solve. This kind of contradictory process is confusing for customers and leaves them unsure of what they can expect from your brand.

Process and policy standardization is the first step in avoiding these types of problems in the customer journey. If your operations are consistent across the organization, customers get a common, sensible experience throughout their journey.

Benefits of procedural constancy include:

• Giving clients a clear idea of what they can expect when they interact with you.
• Creating confidence in future projects as customers have an understanding of how your company operates.
• Making self-service and similar tools more valuable because clients understand what they can achieve through such tools and when they need to contact customer support for help.
• Ensuring customers understand who can help them with different types of issues.
• Reinforcing your brand identity and customer experience priorities across every type of interaction.

Modern BPM systems create process frameworks and data workflows that let you standardize processes across your business units and enforce consistency through apps and services that naturally align with internal requirements.

Get a Step Ahead of Your Customers

Customers are going to interact with your business in diverse ways. This “omni-channel dilemma” can create plenty of problems on your end if your processes aren’t in order. In particular, moving data seamlessly between social, mobile and Web channels, depending on how a customer contacts you, is essential.

This wider range of channels for customer contact makes context more important than ever. Creating a positive customer journey hinges on putting all information into the right context so your employees can have positive, efficient interactions with clients. BPM makes this possible by attaching data and application workflows to your business processes.

A Great Journey Fuels Customer Loyalty

When was the last time you interacted with a business and came away feeling special? Chances are you went through a journey with that business and something ended up really sticking out. Perhaps a sales worker had key information available precisely when you needed it, or a customer service representative understood your full account history at first contact. These small details create positive spikes in the customer experience and serve as highlights in the customer journey.

Coordinating data and processes across your business units gives your users the tools they need to worry less about the background work and more on the actual customer interaction. This lets your employees create positive experiences throughout the customer journey, turning a satisfied customer into a great one.