Lifting the Lid on Customer Journey Management

Published 09/07/24 under:

Broken contact centre journeys are bad news. Customers get inconsistent experiences, while employees struggle with fragmented data and tracking cross-channel movements. Unable to visually pinpoint the root causes or financial values for remediating broken journeys, CX and contact centre leaders end up between a rock and a hard place. Discover how Genesys journey visualization and orchestration solutions remove such blind spots.

Be Sure Everyone Uses the Same Definition  

The term ‘customer journey’ gets bandied about a lot and can be easily confused. It refers to a sequence of steps customers take to achieve a goal that delivers value to themselves and hopefully the business. Such as making it easy for customers to shop and make the right purchases (see image 1 for more examples).  A customer journey is not a marketing campaign, a single interaction (such as completing a purchase or placing a support call), or an internal process.

Making Dots Easy to Join 

Customers expect journeys with a personal touch on any channel of their choice. Yet surprisingly 65% (Genesys: The State of Customer Experience Report 2024) of companies still struggle to form a single customer view because they lack integrated cross-channel data.

For instance, voice, IVR and chat teams may track performance within their own channels, but can’t see how interactions in one place affect another. What happens outside the contact centre is also often a mystery. So, it’s virtually impossible to piece together customers’ needs, pain points, and behaviours.

That’s where journey visualisation and orchestration comes in.

Unifying Customer Journey Data

Genesys Customer Journey Management software enables organisations to uncover and correlate insights across all customer touchpoints – voice, chat, email, IVR, bots, websites, mobile and social channels, back office systems, case management data, and survey tools.

In addition, embedded AI and machine learning capabilities rapidly diagnose problems and identify improvement areas based on potential impact to customer experience (CX) and business outcomes. For example, by flushing out the root causes of customer friction, digital fallout, and churn.

Identifying Journeys that Matter Most

Image 1 depicts seven frequent customer journey stages. Organisations will naturally attach different priorities. For instance, renewing or upgrading a service could be critical to the success of a telecoms provider focused on retention and maximising customer lifetime value. Initiating automatic loan payments might be a crucial journey for a financial services institution looking to reduce the cost of collecting overdue payments.

Image 1: The seven customer journey stages

Establish the goals that matter most to your customer and business. Then identify the key steps leading to those goals. For example, applying for a mortgage is a journey that encompasses several milestones, from finding the place, to assessing options, applying for the loan, and paying the first bill.

Discovering why Customers take Different Paths

Customers exhibit different behaviours and adopt different routes across omnichannel touchpoints. Image 2 illustrates a typical onscreen view provided by Genesys tools.

The top line shows customers reporting and resolving a service issue from start to finish using a company’s mobile app. However, some customers aren’t able to complete the process so switch to WhatsApp (middle line) or call to speak to an agent (bottom line). Once the case is closed the customer receives a satisfaction survey. If the results reveal lower scores than usual, the need to investigate is triggered.

Image 2: Identifying friction through an end-to-end customer journey view

Crucially, Genesys Journey Management tools allow CX leaders and contact centre managers to understand exactly why customers are switching channels and correctly target the right steps to get cost-to-serve and NPS/CSAT back on track.

Use Cases and Business Outcomes

Recognising intent, identifying prior contacts, and spotting preferences makes it easier to route customers to the channels and agents best suited to issue resolution.

Other Genesys journey management use cases and benefits include:

• Maximizing digital self-service success rates, reducing channel switches, and curbing repeat calls.
• Fixing revenue leakage due to unsuccessful account registrations and online payments.
• Identifying potential gaps or areas for improvement in products and services.
• Delivering pop-up messages with special discount codes or low stock alerts, boosting online sales and reducing basket abandonment rates.
• Automatically suppressing promotional emails to customers trying to resolve issues.
• Proactively reducing complaint handling and case management effort.

As the longest standing Genesys Cloud partner in EMEA, with the most successful deployments, Kerv Experience continues to help clients accelerate improvements that boost the customer and employee experience.

To learn more about lifting the lid on your customer journeys, please get in touch!