Navigating the 2024 Customer Journey Landscape: Insights and Innovations with Nate Lamos

In 2024, the customer journey landscape has seen major shifts, driven by digital transformation and AI integration. Alterian VP of Business Development, Nate Lamos discusses how businesses are leveraging these technologies to enhance customer engagement and create personalized experiences. Despite successes, challenges remain in measuring ROI and aligning goals with diverse technologies. Read this article as Nate explores the current trends and future outlook for customer journeys.

Current Market Landscape

2. How have customer behaviors changed?

In short, customers now reward brands that understand they are in charge. They expect personalized, effortless experiences across all channels and use their best experience as a baseline for all others. Why should they be inconvenienced because a brand can’t synchronize its channels in real-time? Increasingly, customers refuse to tolerate operational limitations and believe brands should intuitively anticipate their needs. To stay competitive, businesses must meet these evolving expectations.

Successes in Customer Journeys

3. What are some of the notable successes in customer journeys this year?

The most notable successes focus on enhancing customer engagement through machine learning and AI. AI has greatly advanced personalization and behavioral prediction, leading many brands to prioritize their efforts to keep up. Our most successful clients and partners began by applying AI to their data analytics, leading to immediate insights and roadmaps for improving customer experiences through new journey orchestrations. This step-by-step approach has helped avoid analysis paralysis and inaction seen in other companies.

4. Can you share some specific success stories?

Most notable for Alterian in the past six months has been the ability to apply new AI processes to our journey analytics engine and query enormous industry data sets to quickly show brands how they compare to their competitors in any stage of the lifecycle journey. Brands can see where their journeys are better or worse than those of their competitors and gain immediate insights into the areas of the business that need an adjustment to better ROI, satisfaction, or cost savings. Several clients and partners are already using this new offering and it is gaining much interest across our client base.

Challenges in Navigating Customer Journeys

5. Despite these successes, what challenges are businesses facing in navigating customer journeys? How do businesses balance these challenges with their goals?

The consistent challenges we see are ROI, goal alignment, and diverse technology. Measuring ROI for customer journey initiatives can be difficult, especially when decision-makers don’t fully understand how each touchpoint contributes to the overall experience. Successful brands prove ROI in specific journey steps, building on “small wins” that lead to bigger wins and cross-functional buy-in. Different stakeholders see benefits like increased satisfaction, cost reduction, and higher conversions. These small orchestration wins foster belief in the overall customer experience improvement. This unified approach also accelerates investment in integrating complex systems, data, and new technologies.

Future Outlook

6. Looking ahead, what emerging technologies should businesses be aware of?

AI, then some more AI. We’re already tired of hearing those two letters together, but the real business changes being put in place now are just an exciting hint of what’s coming in the next few years. The capabilities for understanding, adjusting and automating our business interactions have exploded, and we’re already seeing the need for “proper and relevant” personalization from brands based on the real-time context for each user in each moment. One interesting area of focus across our partner network is the rise of personal agents and what it means for their businesses. What will it mean to our brands when the majority of customers have their personal AI interact with our systems while they spend time doing the things they’d rather be doing?

7. What trends do you anticipate in customer expectations?

Customers will force all brands to match their best previous experience with any single brand. Wallets will open for the brands that embrace the ideal of properly personalized and efficient experiences and truly build their businesses around putting the customer in control. Businesses will still need to increase their understanding of the customer and build their capabilities to interact with customers at real-time and at scale, but with the focus on using that information and capability to be more transparent and trustful with the customer, which is at the heart of meeting customer expectations in the first place.

Any final comments?

Yes! Please don’t be a dinosaur. Build or rebuild your business around the customer and aggressively put them in charge. If customers want to research, interact, buy, and receive support in a different way, enable those different ways and be a tour guide along many paths rather than a stop light on a one-way road.