Understanding Customer Experience Throughout the Customer Journey

These days, more companies are using AI to transform the customer journey in ways that will forever shape customer service and business as we know it.

In a post-channel world, the customer is the central focus of all marketing efforts. Campaigns aren’t about maintaining a far-reaching brand presence entirely, but they are also about offering a unified front, which enhances the user experience. This presents your business with multiple opportunities for up-selling, cross-selling and nurturing brand loyalty.
 

 
However, this post-channel world also comes with its challenges as well.

In this blog, we’ll show you the importance of AI in the customer journey, the use of AI in the present age and how you can transform your own customers’ journey by implementing some powerful approaches.

Challenges in the Post-Channel World

While the post-channel world is an era of excitement and possibilities, it also comes with its fair share of challenges. It’s not as straightforward to allow customers to chat with businesses as easily as they chat with their friends and family.

The main two challenges business owners come across are:

1. Really understanding the customer and his/her needs and intent, then acting accordingly.
2. Eliminating siloed channels by connecting the dots all across the customer journey.

To illustrate these roadblocks, consider the typical retail experience. There’s an average of 100 choices or various directions the customer could take. Being able to optimize the journey in order to create a convenient and personalized experience can’t be accomplished by using traditional technology.

That’s where artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning come in.

AI allows a website to understand what each individual visitor or potential customer wants, then it makes that insight actionable.

Three Common Customer Journey Myths

Along with challenges, there are also a few myths that surround the customer journey.

Before digging into the importance of AI in the customer journey, it’s important to understand the true reality of your customer’s journey, which involves debunking some common myths.

1. Customer engagement and acquisition are not related.
2. IVR or interactive voice response, chat, mobile, social and other channels are each different systems which require a channel-based approach.
3. Assisted service and self-service are also two different journeys.

Reality #1 – Customer Expect Simple Communications

Your brand and business should not be having more than one conversation with your customer at a time. Think about it from your customer’s point of view.

It doesn’t matter whether they want to resolve a customer service situation or if they’re discussing buying a product or service. They expect to have one, quality conversation with your brand at a time.

Reality #2 – The Customer Experience Happens Across All Channels.

A customer’s journey may start with a mobile search request, then move to a desktop computer, social channels or a website.

Once a potential customer has decided to engage with your business, you may respond accordingly through chat and IVR. This should be a growing, nurtured relationship and continual conversation, no matter which platform it happens on.

Reality #3 – It is the Same Journey

You shouldn’t define the customer journey in relation to the channel, such as social, IVR or mobile. This is an example of channel-centric thinking.

You also shouldn’t be segmenting assisted and self-service as separate journeys. They are one of the same!

You Must Keep The Conversation Going

No matter what happens, keep the convo going! When you think about it, what happens if you don’t deliver when it counts?

According to a stat from 2016, 85% of customers discontinued doing business with a company after a negative experience.

Incorporating AI chatbots that mimic your best agents and predict customer needs can help make your brand that much stronger and more trustworthy. AI can help your brand recognize returning customers so that they can pick up from where they left off, making business fast and efficient.

This use of AI in the present age offers the necessity to create an easy, personalized and convenient customer experience.

Your 5-Step Approach to Customer Experience Transformation

The best way to approach your customer experience is to first create a roadmap.

After that, you can begin optimizing each journey at a time for your site visitors and potential customers. However, since basically every second count in this set-up, you can’t transform the customer experience immediately.

That’s why we’ve put together a step-by-step approach to help transform your customer journey:

1. Concentrate on the largest and most impactful journeys first.
2. Analyze and record your top journey to find current experience issues.
3. Redesign your customer journeys as you see fit.
4. Automate and then transform these journeys.
5. Upkeep: analyze, measure and continue to optimize the journeys.

Customer Intent Models

Do you know what’s frustrating for everyone?

Waiting for AI technology to smarten up.

This is why predeveloped customer intent models are vital. These types of models prepare the AI software to predict what customers want, then they deliver the best results immediately.

Pick a suitable vendor for your industry with a proven intent model to do the work for you!

Help Create Memorable Moments for Customers

Choosing AI and chat data to optimize each customer journey and moment can be amazing for the future.

For example:

If you own a travel site, your chat agent will quickly become a reliable source if a site visitor searching for hotels is greeted with, “Do you need help choosing a hotel in Miami?”

The system knows the visitor is searching for a four-star hotel in the area, which immediately allows your site to become trusted and to stand out from other third-party travel sites.

Takeaway Best Practices for a Holistic Journey

Since we just bombarded you with a load of (fantastic) information, let’s do a quick summary to help you really soak up the main points of the article.

What you should walk away with are these four key insights for using AI to transform your customer journey:

1. Use the proper data and tools for analysis.
2. Start off small — all good things take time.
3. Connect the dots to make the customer journey smooth and simple.
4. Properly connect your channels to offer a unified platform.

Once you deliver an outstanding experience throughout the customer journey, you’ll see improvements in customer satisfaction, loyalty, and best of all, in your profit margins. In time, people will become brand advocates who recommend your brand to others.

In order to achieve this holistic, personalized experience, your brand needs to truly understand its customers. This is required in order to anticipate your customers’ needs and to continue the relationship long after the first sale.

AI-powered technology is the key to it all. It’s time to embrace the future.