What is Customer Journey Optimization?
Customer journey refers to the different paths a consumer can follow while doing business with a company, and what they see, experience, think and feel along the way. For example, a potential customer might click on a Facebook ad, land on a confusing product page, chat with a helpful agent, decide they want to go to a retail store to try the product on, and then go online via their mobile device to make the purchase because they have a web-only coupon. It can be a multichannel experience, it's non-linear, and customers can receive different impressions from each touchpoint. Customer journey optimization is the process of analyzing and improving different customer journeys, with the goal of delivering a better, more consistent, exceptional experience that will result in higher revenue.
Customer journey optimization emphasizes analyzing data from an organization’s sales and service channels. This means it combines data from multiple systems, which could include CRM, IVR, web analytics, email campaign management, and more. The sheer volume of data can be overwhelming for the customer journey optimization team, so they might approach it by segmenting their customers and looking at the customer journey by segment. Another approach is to just look at the most common paths and make sure those are optimized.
Customer journey optimization efforts result in improvements to or elimination of pain points caused by web pages, store policies, customer service practices, email content, app design, and more. The confusing product page mentioned above would be redesigned in a truly effective customer journey optimization initiative. No touchpoint should be off limits. But this can be difficult due to the potential number of departments involved. For this reason, customer journey optimization projects need executive backing to ensure organizational alignment. Businesses that are successful at customer journey optimization will reap the rewards.
How NICE can help
NICE CXone is the market leading call center software in use by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world to help them consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences. Our powerful analytics tools can play a significant role in any customer journey optimization effort. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help a company holistically run its call (or contact) center operations. CXone includes:
Omnichannel Routing – routing and interaction management that empowers agents to positively and productively interact with customers in digital and voice channels. These solutions include an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), interaction channel support and proactive outbound dialer.
Analytics – turns insights into results by making data relevant, easy to consume and actionable to drive measurable improvements and understand the omnichannel experience customers receive. These solutions include interaction analytics, customer surveys, reporting and performance management.
Automation & Artificial Intelligence (AI) – leading-edge, intuitive technology that eliminates mundane tasks and speeds resolutions of customer issues for better business outcomes.It provides self-service, agent-assisted and fully automated alerts and actions.