How To Gain A Competitive Advantage And Optimize Your Customer Journey

Liz Ross, CEO, Shift Paradigm.

With more than 26 years of experience leading some of the world’s most progressive and fastest-growing agencies, I can confidently say the marketers’ holy grail continues to be customer connectivity. Whether through owned media or campaigns, I know the value that experience and emotion can play in purchasing decisions.

In the digital age of automation, it’s easy for even large brands to get caught in a “set it and forget it” mentality for customer touchpoints. Marketers automate email triggers, retarget based on consumption patterns and create playbooks for conversational chatbots on a website. Add in AI or ChatGPT, and you’ve exponentially raised your automation from customer interactions and messaging.

Automation is so prolific that Hubspot’s “2023 State of Marketing Report” notes that effective marketers are 46% more likely to use automation in their roles than those reporting an ineffective strategy, and industry experts are projecting a 12.8% compound annual growth rate in automation software by 2027.

I’ve found that a lack of necessary data and insights or poorly set-up campaigns are some of the most common pitfalls in today’s marketing automation deployments. Poor inputs into AI inhibit ML, and messaging is particularly challenging. These issues, paired with customer expectations for speed, responsiveness and personalization following accelerated digitalization of a post-pandemic world, are having a dizzying effect, particularly when marketers are being asked to do more with less.

Customer experience begins by understanding the customer journey. What good is a 360-degree customer view if you can’t add predictive analytics or account for the dynamic nature of human behavior influenced by numerous external and internal stimuli?

Customer journeys are shifting.

Customer journeys have significantly transformed over the past five years due to rapid technological advancements. Today’s marketers balance brand experiences across multiple touchpoints and omnichannel experiences, infusing creativity and flexibility into customer journeys for competitive advantages.

Customer journeys include all the touchpoints between the customer and company, including marketing, sales, customer support and post-sales support. They are a critical component of customer experience, encompassing overall feelings toward a brand.

Today’s customers want a human-like experience, which requires marketers to be deliberate about both AI and ML to ensure automation isn’t deleterious to the overall customer experience. Companies with effective digital customer experience tools are four times more likely to have implemented personalization, a nod to the growing expectation of customers that companies know them.

Here are three ways to gain a competitive advantage and optimize your customer journeys.

1. Add more flexibility to your customer journeys

.Creating a more flexible customer journey allows companies to respond more to external factors while adjusting to meet new challenges. For example, the airline industry offers customers increased flexibility based on potential weather disruptions or personal emergencies, which can help increase customer satisfaction. Well-honed yield management practices allow for higher last-minute fares with more flexible terms, attracting a more time-sensitive business customer and creating additional revenue opportunities.

A few ways businesses can add flexibility to journeys are through strategic segmentation, next-best action and predictive analytics. For example, adding a pathway for people to buy now, pay later may spur a reluctant shopper to get to the next ring. Savvy B2B marketers can leverage predictive analytics to serve up meaningful content based on buyer committee conversations based on similar actions of other customers within the industry or growth profile.

2. Leverage always-on analytics and insight generation.

Advanced analytics and tools help identify opportunities for optimization; determine where, when and how to reach potential customers; understand customer behaviors; and anticipate customer needs to gain a unique edge on the competition.

I’ve noticed many organizations have these tools in place but fail to optimize them for cross-organizational insight. Use these insights to help inform key points along the customer journey, offering additional revenue and connection opportunities.

For example, even in highly regulated industries like healthcare, sharing of data and insights can lead to enhanced customer experiences. Large healthcare companies use predictive analytics so that customers with a certain mix of prescriptions may benefit from healthier living articles or recipes. Additionally, healthcare companies may be able to analyze potential risk factors for various health conditions and provide targeted care to at-risk patients by leveraging predictive analytics and machine learning to serve up relevant content and opportunities for enhanced care.

3. Enable advanced personalization at scale.

In the early ’90s, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers authored The One to One Future, with the key idea of individualized communications with brands. While marketers’ desires to enable this customer experience were strong, the technology fell short.

Today, thanks in large part to technological innovation over the last five years, marketers are closer to one-to-one than ever before by delivering advanced personalization at scale—leveraging data, insights and next-gen technical platforms to not only deliver relevant messaging but doing it at the right time in the right place. For example, delivering personalized opportunities at the time of purchase, including offers based on past behavior, cross-sell items, or creating unique owned media interactions with specialized offers.

To enable true one-to-one marketing, marketers need to acknowledge the organizational effort that is required for integrated marketing. This requires breaking down data silos where possible, anonymizing data details where necessary and creating continual systems for learning.

For some companies, this will require mundane tasks like ensuring the same data taxonomy is in place to leverage cross-organizational data. Other companies with more integrated data will need to ensure data governance is in place and usage is understood.

Where automation enabled the ability to reach more people with more messages, AI and ML are adding a level of personalization unlike ever before. The challenge is having the right technology and organizational structure in place to scale your one-to-many messages to one-to-one messaging with increased relevancy, leveraging the users’ data to create truly advanced personalized experiences.

Optimizing your customer journeys can drive incremental revenue and improve overall customer experience. By adding flexibility, leveraging always-on analytics, generating insights and enabling advanced personalization at scale, businesses can keep their competitive edge and their customers.

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