Journey Management – The Next Evolution of CX

1 ABSTRACT

This Journey Management piece analyses the current status quo of the Customer Experience (CX) Management industry. It provides insight into the key challenges faced by Business Leaders, Marketers and CX Professionals in their quest to craft exceptional experiences while having to demonstrate the value of CX within their organizations.
Journey Management offers a pragmatic approach for large organizations to leapfrog into a new era of orchestrated customer journeys with early and continuous demonstrable value creation.

This piece introduces Journey Management as the next evolution of CX, describes a pragmatic approach for CX Professionals embarking on Journey Management and includes an overview of the data-driven enablement tools.

2 PROBLEM STATEMENT

Customer Experience (CX) Management as a practice and discipline in large organizations has plateaued in its ability to shift the experiences it delivers to customers across the entire journey, and in turn demonstrate value creation both for the customers and the organization.

Although organizations have matured in their ability to measure customer experience, CX programs have not provided a strong enough basis for the investments made in CX. [1] Forbes tells us that the increase in CX Management efforts, resource and focus is disproportionate to the value created for customers and organizations.
As CX Management continuously pushes to the top of every business’s strategic agenda, CX Professionals need a new approach and a new thinking to impact change, and deliver results.

3 WHAT ARE EXECUTIVES THINKING ABOUT?

3.1 Retention

Digitization has changed the business environment leaving customers in control of who they choose to do business with. As a result executives are faced with decreasing retention rates, and acquiring new customers can cost up to 25% more than retaining existing customers. Systemic customer retention directly increases profits [2].

Furthermore, the effort and cost to switch providers has reduced with the growing choice of channels and new market entrants such as fintech start-ups and mobile brokering apps. With every negative interaction a customer has, their likelihood to defect increases and therefore managing experiences across the entire customer journey becomes critical.

Businesses are often only aware that a customer has moved on when their payments cease. There are few examples where businesses predict that a customer will cancel based upon triggers and even fewer where they are able to intervene proactively to ensure retention.

Managing customer retention has been difficult because the drivers for defection have been difficult to determine, both at an individual level or across customers. Journey Management provides an effective data-driven approach to customer retention.

3.2 Cross-Sell

Most organizations have a menu of products and services available to their customers. For businesses to ensure success, a key objective is to increase the coverage of products per customer. Well-designed product offerings will enhance the value proposition to the customer but are also critical for business growth, generating both revenue and long-term stickiness.
The premise for effective cross-sell strategies is that a good relationship exists between the business and customers. This is only achieved when the customer has satisfying and value-adding experiences over a period of time, generating trust and loyalty. The effectiveness of cross-sell efforts is often diluted because of the disparity that exists between Marketing and CX Professionals – what we say and what we do.

Marketers are further challenged when attempting to target actual customer needs through their initiatives. Targeting increases effectiveness and reduces the cost of engagement. Unfortunately, organizations are generally poor at creating and maintaining a single view of every customer, which includes all interactions, preferences and behaviour. All of which provides critical data points for personalization and offer targeting. Businesses have all the data they need for Marketers who want to leverage customer profile data to enable cross-selling, but this tends to result in numerous internal data organization projects.

3.3 Acquisition

Especially in the online space, aggregators and mass digital channel adoption are making it harder to convert customers. At the same time customers are becoming pickier and smarter in their buying decisions. Social channels have made it easier than ever for consumers to research brands and products.

The power of online consumer reviews can make or break the success of a product in the market. Customer advocacy is the highest strategic objective for Marketers following retention. Customers advocate as a result of their journeys when they achieve desired goals, not on ad-hoc interactions.

This means that traditional campaigning is becoming less effective. Marketers and CX Professionals are coming together to orchestrate journeys, generate advocacy and are seeking new and innovative mechanisms for reaching new markets while managing the cost of acquisition.