Using Technology To Craft The Customer Journey
For the past decade, the sheer volume of digital channels and data points has escalated at an amazing rate. Every industry has been disrupted.
The customer now rules; it’s a fact! As a result, making your customer journey a great experience should now be your number one priority – so how do you think you’re performing as a challenger brand?
“By 2020 customer experience will be more important than price in the purchase decision” Garnter
Now here is a worrying statistic:
In a recent survey by Bain & Company, 80% of the brands they spoke to believed that they delivered a ‘superior experience’ to their customers – however, when they spoke to the customers only 8% agreed.
Clearly the customer experience is not exclusively delivered in the digital environment. It lives in the physical and emotional world as well, but with so many touchpoints and interactions to manage it’s technology that provides the glue that binds all three together.
So what do you need?
A new website? Yes. You need a site that’s better, faster, smarter and that functions across multiple platforms. This is absolutely important, after all your website is very often the first and only interaction with your brand..
But this should not be where a ‘technology’ strategy begins and ends. Managing the entire customer experience requires more than just a slick website. You need to think further ahead. In fact, you should be building an entire infrastructure.
From analytics that help create personalised interactions, to mobile applications that create personal brand experiences for every interaction, CRM tools that track the span of a customer relationship, the whole customer journey relies completely on its technological elements.
By creating a unified infrastructure you can optimise your customers with a seamless experience across all channels and with consumers continuously seeking a multi-channel experience, brands must ensure they get a consistent message across all touchpoints.
So what’s stopping you?
Well, here’s another worrying stat: Only 30% of businesses organise the functions of their business to deliver superior customer experiences.
One reason is that some brands have been slow to react to the demands of the modern marketing environment. Is it a resource issue or simply a case of reorganising their structure?
The other, and this is confirmed in another recent survey, is that businesses are struggling with drafting a technology strategy, and embedding strategic objectives throughout the organisation. As a result only a third of businesses are able to apply the right technology in a strategic manner, and one in five organisations can label themselves as ‘technology proof’.
So where do you start?
First things first, recognise that it’s going to take time to build the right infrastructure – it doesn’t just happen overnight, and to be honest, it will be painful at various stages.
Break the project down into simple yet logical stages, and set targets for what you expect each stage of the development to achieve.
Start by mapping your customer journey, think about it from your customer’s point of view, understand the touchpoints, and define what you want to happen and when you want it to happen.
Build your infrastructure to deliver your customer experience, not vice versa.
Finally, make sure you have the right partners to support you.
Why not take a look at the journey we take our clients on to map, plan and build their infrastructure? Simply click here and contact one of our specialists as to how we can help you.
At Vault MCM we manage 1000’s of customer experiences every year – digital, physical and emotional. And right now we’re helping our clients plan and build world-class technology infrastructures, designed to meet the needs of the customer age.
