Customer Experience and Contact Optimization through Journey Analytics

User's Purchase Journey in today's Digital World typically spans multiple channels and devices. It is no longer completed start to finish in a single channel. However, many of the large Enterprises still run channel marketing independently (Email Marketing, Display and Search Engine Marketing, Social Marketing) with loose collaboration with other Marketing and sales functions. Consequently, customer experience remains fragmented. To address this gap, it critical to take an integrated analytic approach in designing and monitoring end to end user journeys. Such an approach results in optimizing user experience and contact optimization and is the focus of this brief post

Part of the problem today has to do with the complex Digital Marketing Systems. Digital Marketing ecosystems within enterprises today comprise of multitudes of products silos. Enterprise need to create an integrated view across the funnel, devices, channels and various footprint databases in the user journey. Each function/ person or decision system interacting with the user is then aware of the all prior interactions in the context of the journey to be highly relevant and personalized.

Several of the Data Driven Marketing Platforms do offer some of these capabilities but challenge for the enterprises is to mix and match on premise / home grown /vendor/ SAAS products which are part of the eco-system and extend it across marketing, sales and service functions. An integrated analytic approach would need to combine all events and data from every touch point and products and. User identities across channels and devices need to be stitched to provide view of the complete journey of user. With the advances in event processing, big data and machine learning technologies it is no longer a challenge to create such an Integrated Analytic Platform for the Enterprise. We are engaged with couple of large enterprises in creation of such a platform. Organizations can take a multi-stage approach to realizing such a platform. Cross channel performance dashboards, media spend optimization are the low hanging fruits of such a platform followed by journey analytics, contact optimization stage and finally real-time personalization stage. Each of these are vast topics and this post consequently focus only on Journey Analytics critical for contact optimization.

Let us look at the top 3 areas where Journey Analytics plays a crucial role:

Customer Experience: CX teams relay on Journey Event Mapping to envision the ideal/optimal journeys users can take across channel properties. Journey Analytics is used to unearth the actual journeys the users tread across channel properties. This insight is then used by experience teams to validate and update Journey Maps and channel properties for the desired effect.

Digital Containment: Another key area of Journey Analytics is Digital containment or techniques to prevent digital leakage. Digital containment is to ensure the user Journey is contained start to finish within online channels; and user does not switch to offline channels which are often costlier. Journeys Analytics is used to identify problem areas where and on what specific journey points users are switching to offline channels so that those issues can be addressed to achieve Digital Containment.

Contact Optimization: Another area where Journey Analytics is beneficial is in Contact Optimization. Here custom user interface and APIs on top of Journey Analytics repository is used to expose “Journey context” to marketing and sales functions that interact with user during the journey to optimize their contact strategy. This repository can be used by humans and systems alike with an integrated Customer Experience Event Data Model

Customer Experience Event Data Model uses an Event Taxonomy that all interaction systems understand. Journey Event Map is a Business tool leveraging the Event repository and the Event Data Model. Here is a sample UI of the Journey Event Map targeted for a Chat agent or a call center agent.

Journey Event Map is a web based UI with Role Based Access Control (RBAC) integrated with the enterprise Directory/Single Sign On systems. For outbound calls the agent can enter the number he is planning to call and the UI shows all the events associated with that user in the Journey timeline. Depending on the event key information about the event is also displayed (as per the event taxonomy). For example for

·        Web, the pages the user visited during a web session is displayed.

·        Email / Social and SEM the associated campaign and offer details are shown.

·        A chat event the key messages shown include sentiment score by text analytics.

·      Calls, it would show the campaign information, duration of call, lead classification

For inbound calls the UI can be integrated to automatically pull up the user event map for the agent without the need for him to enter the identity. 

The UI also shows the identities of user across channels and devices linked by the Integrated Analytics Platform. The UI can also be customized to display lead qualification information as well such as if it meets the Sales defined Qualification Criteria or not.

Today call center agents operate mostly blind to what the user has done in other channels (Web, Social, Email). With the Journey Event Map, agents would at a glance be aware of all interactions in the Journey Context and choose to engage via the users' preferred channel / time and have a highly relevant and personalized conversation. Journey Event Map would be customized for different enterprise user / function accessing it. For example, Email Marketing team would be able to review the email lists. The lists that would be reviewed and flagged are for excessively contacted users, potential product mismatches, and existing customers so they can be filtered from the list.

For decision systems, personalization engines and conversational agent Journey context would be available via an API. The System would gather all users events coupled with event taxonomy to decipher the data and thus personalize the message/content/conversation. This way Journey Event Map would serve as a powerful tool for Contact Optimization.

In this post we looked at how Journey Analytics aids in contact optimization. I will cover the other areas of Journey Analytics in subsequent posts.

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