Digital Customer Engagement Strategies

Spotlight on Digital Customer Engagement

• Companies are now proactively managing customer journeys, rather than simply reacting to them.
• This shift is driven by empowered consumers who have access to information and tools to dictate their desired experience.
• Consumers want what they want, when they want it, at a low price, and delivered conveniently.
• Companies like Sungevity are examples of firms successfully shaping customer journeys.
• Their journey focuses on personalized digital customer experience, from initial contact to installation and beyond.

Streamlining the Decision Journey

• Classic Journey: Customers extensively consider and evaluate options before committing or moving into a loyalty loop.
• New Journey: Focuses on eliminating the evaluation stage, quickly moving customers into the loyalty loop.
• Companies are streamlining customer decision journeys, focusing on a high-value experience and attracting customers.

Four Key Capabilities

• Automation: Digitizing and streamlining manual steps in a customer journey;
• Proactive Personalization: Using data from past interactions to tailor the next steps of the journey;
• Contextual Interaction: Adjusting the experience based on a customer's current location or context.
• Journey Innovation: Ongoing experimentation; identifying new opportunities to enhance and expand the journey.

New Journey Technologies

• Continuous Connection Capability: Maintaining an open link between the company and customer for continuous data collection about product use to guide ongoing customization.
• New Journey Analysis and Management Tools: Tracking and optimizing journeys across multiple channels.
• Widespread Adoption of APIs: Enabling disparate applications to communicate to improve journey management.

The New Journey Management Organization

• The new organizational structure is designed to facilitate managing customer journeys effectively, drawing on skills from various functions.
• A key role is the "Journey Product Manager" managing the entire customer experience as a product.
• A team of specialists (scrum teams) is organized to rapidly iterate and improve the customer journey.

Holding Journey Managers Accountable

• Journey management requires using appropriate metrics that gauge progress and performance, which tracks the evolution of investments and ROI.
• Financial metrics need to be considered to measure and allocate resources.
• Key aspects of accountability include customer satisfaction and tracking the performance of different partner functions.
• Metrics should track journey ROI, ongoing cost of delivery, generated revenue & profits, and the impact of innovations.

Best Practices for Journey Improvement

• The best practitioners aim to improve existing journeys by adding useful steps and features rather than just modifying existing ones.
• Companies frequently focus on narrow segments of customers to understand user preferences and usage patterns.
• Journey innovation and design are driven by the desire to create new value propositions for customers and increase engagement.