This article was written in 2017 during my time at SVDS. The article was first published on the SVDS Blog.
In the introductory post, we walked through some examples of how SVDS has seen data capabilities determine the success of customer journey initiatives for our clients. In this post, we offer guidance on the data-related initiatives that you can start today to begin fostering closer ties with your customers—regardless of where you currently are in your specific state of development.
Customer journeys allow for a holistic experience
A senior marketer’s ability to find and create valuable experiences for customers has grown dramatically in recent years. Beyond the traditional responsibilities of brand and creative management, senior marketers (such as CMOs, Brand Managers, and Product Marketing Managers) now use analytics to track customer interactions, measure the quality of engagement, and determine the effectiveness of an enormous range of different marketing tactics.
Marketers often map out a “customer journey” in order to manage successful engagements. The customer journey is the complete sum of experiences that your customers go through when interacting with your company and brand—mapping out these interactions gives you a holistic view of how customers engage with your company. While many marketers focus on developing positive interactions, a customer journey is a plan that focuses on how a series of engagements can generate momentum from awareness, to sale, to ongoing loyalty and advocacy.
Creating customer journey opportunities with data
At SVDS, we have seen leaders use data to drive more useful customer engagements—first and foremost by recognizing their need to embrace change. There is a big shift taking place, and that shift will become the new normal.
You should be trying to learn quickly, and fail fast. Companies that are able make the best use of their data and infrastructure earlier than their competition are at an advantage—both with regard to increased customer loyalty and improvements in new product development.
In a November 2015 Harvard Business Review article on the customer journey, the authors stated that, “Best practitioners aim not just to improve the existing journey but to expand it, adding useful steps or features.” As mentioned in the examples earlier in this post, we have seen the same trend: clients who can harness their data to create effective customer experiences often make further investments toward developing their capabilities.
There are data-related initiatives that you can begin pursuing today to develop stronger relationships with your customers. Make an honest assessment of where you stand now, and find yourself in the sections below.
If you are starting from scratch:
- Common Challenges
- Redefining decision-making based on insights
- Identifying single points of ownership
- Common Solutions
- Focus on top-down buy-in. Without recognition from leadership, data initiatives will struggle to get relevance with business users and may be piecemeal efforts, diminishing the value of investment.
If you are performing early project identification:
- Common Challenges
- Mapping out customer journey initiatives
- Identifying single points of ownership
- Common Solutions
- Get alignment on the full picture. It is important to be able to articulate the “full view” of the customer experience as it has a large effect on decision making. For example, only tracking successful interactions would lead to very different conclusions than understanding users that “turn away.”
- Plan for iteration. It often takes time to understand where your map does and does not match your customers’ realities.
- Start small. Change can be incremental—look for low-hanging fruit.
If you are establishing customer visibility:
- Common Challenges
- Data integration
- Common Solutions
- Prioritize data collection in tandem with journey mapping. In instrumentation, it is important to know what behaviors you can collect directly from customers and what behaviors you have to infer based on their actions. This influences what additional data sources you include to support decisions you make for the business.
- Seek to reuse and extend data services. Developing known, validated, and consistent data assets for your business increases their utility and dramatically improves trust in the developed insights across the organization.
If you are optimizing for growth:
- Common Challenges
- Personalization and automation
- Common Solutions
- Enable advanced analytics. Optimize for automation to create feedback loops and self-learning capabilities that make it easy to identify and capitalize on growth opportunities.
What steps are you taking to strengthen your customer engagement strategies through better use of data?