Journey Intelligence is Under-Valued

It is a known fact that 75% of our customers are will to walk away from our respective organizations. Besides, almost 90% of customers say that poor service damages the impression of any brand. I think organizations believe these statistics and want to do something about these strong trends; however, they may not be going about it in the best way. We see organizations jumping on the bandwagons of CRM, retail online, mobile-first, omnichannel, customer-experience (CX), chatbots, smart digital-assistants customer journeys, and hyper-personalization. The question for organizations is, what should they do first, and how to sustain a true customer excellence program?

I think the key to increased customer satisfaction and sustained loyalty is Journey Intelligence. Understanding your customers and how they are shifting, almost in real-time, is quite dependent on journey intelligence. This isn't just about collecting and storing a reservoir of the customer and journey data as part of a big data push. It means truly listening to customers and matching it to their behavior on their customer journey, which may start before your organization's process and for activity beyond them. If organizations are serious about their true customer experience and want to guide their customer excellence programs, they will be spooling up a true Journey intelligence effort.

This means expanding the collection of data or information about the personas that the customers play over and above simple segmentation, the journey interactions of all personas involved with striking an outcome balance between the organization and the customers, the processes and systems leveraged, the technologies leveraged and the people resources at every touchpoint. Once this expansion of customer rich data has been completed, the next step is to add appropriate intelligence by mapping on the customer events on timelines, customer goal progressions, and the effectiveness of all resource support of customer goals.

This group of analysis/inference results will be over and above the normal metrics of revenue, retention, acquisition, churn, repeat purchases, and other traditional analysis. These enable teams and functional areas to not just understand who, what when, and where, why customers did what they did. This results in a turbo charge customer intelligence and even enable new forms of customer journey analysis. Organizations will also learn more about their customer classes and individual tendencies to inform future interactions. Journey intelligence will guide the efforts needed to up the customer excellence game plan. This is an ongoing challenge and set of efforts that will emerge. 

Net; Net:

Leaving Journey Intelligence out of the mix is a real danger for organizations as they falsely believe that they know what the real customer journey is for their customers. This is not necessarily a sin of commission, bit more of omission. They generally only consider the standard paths they over and assume the complete journey occurs in and around their particular organization. If organizations truly orchestrate relevant and consistently great experiences, they will both see reduced costs over time and revenue increases from refugees from the competition.