Understanding customer journeys is critical to delivering best-in-class customer experience and hitting those all-important business goals. But with literally billions of customer interactions to analyze across so many channels and touchpoints, the volume and non-stop nature can make it difficult for businesses to know where to start.
The answer lies in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Solutions such as Alterian's Real-Time CX Platform that leverage AI to analyze and orchestrate optimized customer journeys at scale are now an essential part of any business's customer-led digital transformation.
Understand first, then act
If you are to improve customer journeys and become a truly customer-led business, you must first understand how your customers are interacting with your brand.
AI-powered customer journey analytics makes this possible, aggregating real-time customer behavior and journey data from different customer touchpoints to demonstrate the true intent and action of every customer in the moment.
It listens and analyzes customer behavior in real time and lets you see every single engagement as it's happening, regardless of channel or touchpoint. It also demonstrates the next best action to take to get the most impact. Ultimately, it has the power to do what a team or department cannot do alone: track and measure millions of interactions 24/7 in real time, analyze large amounts of behavior data and identify trends, and draw on these insights to efficiently deliver accurate and valuable recommendations in the moment. These insights allow you to:
- Accurately identify experience breakpoints and opportunities
- Make critical business decisions with confidence and speed
- Understand what actions are required to ensure a positive customer experience and lead customers to the most valuable destination
- Monitor and measure performance
Getting started begins by integrating your existing systems, customer channels and data points via a user-friendly library of prebuilt connectors. This is a quick and easy process and ensures rapid time to value.
Once done, the AI-driven journey analytics process begins listening and analyzing customer interactions and instantly returns insights based on interactions happening in that moment. As more data and interactions are captured over time, AI and machine learning can identify more insightful patterns and deliver even stronger recommendations. Insights can include:
- Identifying cross-channel journey paths
- Discovering drop-off and friction points throughout journeys
- Journey steps
- Hidden micro journeys
- Opportunities for revenue generation
Action time with journey orchestration
The first step to optimizing customer experience is analyzing and understanding your customers and the journeys they take. The next step is to put these insights into action using customer journey orchestration.
By combining behavioral insights with the power of journey orchestration, you're able to deliver relevant and individualized experiences end to end that allow the customer and business to achieve their goals more easily. Drawing on AI and machine learning, it enables teams to efficiently resolve issues and unlock opportunities that have been detected via journey analytics, and automatically orchestrate journeys that satisfy individuals' real-time needs.
Real-time personalization and individualized journeys
Customer journey orchestration uses AI and machine learning to identify all available data about a customer and automatically deliver individualized experiences to them as they're interacting with a brand. Orchestrated journeys adapt in the moment based on the customer's real-time actions as well as historical interactions they've had with the brand. This helps to improve customer satisfaction, increase loyalty, and optimize returns on CX investment.
Customer path predictions that optimize journeys
AI and machine learning capabilities combine mass amounts of journey data to identify predictive models of future journey behavior and use this to automatically serve up the next best experience. This improves outcomes across the board, including increased journey completions, reduced churn, improved cross-sell and upsell results, and greater overall customer satisfaction.
Enhanced hypothesis testing
Testing is essential to customer experience optimization and AI opens many exciting possibilities for teams when implementing, managing and optimizing customer journeys. Real-Time CX allows you to:
- Test and measure the success of multiple variations more efficiently
- Make incremental improvements over time and keep track of performance in real time
- Confidently demonstrate the value of CX initiatives to stakeholders and the broader business
Journey optimization
Journey optimization continually reviews, refines and improves interactions and experiences to drive the best outcomes. Using AI and deep learning, it works by:
- Identifying and analyzing real-time customer behavior and journeys
- Automatically adjusting journeys, or creating new ones, to optimize outcomes
- Continuously testing to ensure journey initiatives are working at their best as customer behavior evolves over time
The result is that decision-makers within the business can more confidently invest time and budget on journeys they know will produce the best results.
The benefits
Customer journeys are unique and complex. To understand, orchestrate and optimize them at scale requires the right technology.
Reduced cost to serve and increased revenue. One not-for-profit boosted donor revenue by 18% using the power of customer journey orchestration.
Improved efficiency. Teams spend days rather than months identifying, understanding and improving customer journeys. One leading bank analyzed and understood more than 7 million customers, billions of interactions and hundreds of customer journeys in weeks.
Scalability. Analyze and action thousands of journeys no matter what size your team is.
Track and optimize. Accurately track and report on performance, prioritizing high-value journeys and events and resolving issues rapidly through customer-led journey orchestration.
Improve CSAT. Create happier customers by eliminating journey friction points and delivering individualized experiences that make it easy for customers to interact with your brand and complete their task. One leading utility company reduced cost to serve, lowered call volumes, and achieved a 174% increase in usage of self-service billing tools.
Brand perception. Increase the likelihood of recommendations and brand advocacy by delivering positive and personalized experiences every time.
Want to find out more?
Our journey discovery starter package is ideal for those just starting out, using customer journey analytics to show you insights and break points across a few of your channels, so you can scale from there when you're ready.
