Building Blocks for a Digital Consumer Experience Platform

It is the year of 2016 and we have been talking about  digital business models for a while now, but existing infrastructure setup and architecture approaches don’t live up to the service expectations of customer 2.0.

New tools, approaches and integration strategies are of the essence.

As a consumer we are expecting services to be tailored to us 

even more so if we opted in to share our valuable consumer preference data in exchange for customized solutions, products and discounts that reward us for our loyalty.

However, only a handful of companies have mastered enabling this mass 1 to 1 personalization of their products and services based on a multitude of insights – each in different data sets and through different channels and what’s worse that it is being collected at different stages of the customer journey of interactions with our products of brand information.

A new breed of business and IT tools allows us to manage these customer journeys at  every part of the customer life cycle from the initial exposure to demand generation followed by the purchase and then post purchase loyalty management.

Throughout this life cycle for every transaction our customers and prospects have many opportunities of distractions along the way – this is even excluding the fact that we often overspend valuable marketing dollars to show our overexposed advertisement across different channels to existing customers vs targeting valuable new prospects with similar preferences as our target customer segments.

In the digital age it is easy to lose track of your customers and prospects when they switch from

1. online to offline,
2. from the webpage to the mobile app,
3. from our corporate website to the competitor website
4. and being shown non-tailored content when personalization at the right  moment would matter.

Here are tools that can help optimize the customer journeys (on the front end visualization layer - aka webpage, mobile app):

• DMPs for consumer identification,
• DSPs for media spend optimization,
• Journey Mapping Solutions to plan for the customer lifecycle interactions with our products

In order to be effective across existing channels and digital channels using these tools needs to be accompanied by advanced business intelligence platforms that companies likely already invested in but the seamless integration of data and technologies is key here to take full advantage of your customer data mart.

Armed these accelerators customer journeys can be mapped out and optimized for content displays and identifying customer IDs across devices and channels by assigning a unique IDs that are linked to device IDs with consumer profiles and tags on our corporate ecommerce website.

The essential steps for consumer journey mapping are:

A customer journey map is a framework that enables you to improve your customer experience. 

The customer journey map documents the customer experience through their perspective, helping you best understand how customers are interacting with you now and helps you identify areas for improvement moving forward.

Great customer journey maps are rooted in data-driven research, and visually represent the different phases your customers experience based on a variety of dimensions such as sentiment, goals, touch points, and more.

The secret sauce to successful customer engagement platforms is to manage the data and insights seamlessly across department boundaries and cross platform to make informed decisions at the right point in time of customer journey key events.

Today’s data driven businesses are integrating marketing and digital initiatives with their business intelligence investment to plan out customer journeys pro-actively based on big data insights derived from a multitude of data sources that are enriched with big data algorithms and predictive business intelligence to optimize the customer journey every step of the way.

In my next article I am going to describe how data driven companies are taking advantage of insights and how to build out consumer profiles that span cloud, on premise and cross device data.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this post are my own personal views and don't represent the views of my employer.

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