5 Mistakes to Avoid When Creating a Full Picture of the Customer Journey

Rachael Royds of CallMiner introduces us to five mistakes that companies make when gaining an overview of the customer journey, highlighting the benefits of speech analytics along the way.

The truth is that if you are tasked in your business to measure the customer experience based on interactions on a single channel, you will only get a one-dimensional view of the customer journey.

The fact is, your customers give you clear advice and feedback about the experience they expect every time they interact with you. The trouble is most companies just aren’t listening to everything they are told.

With this in mind, here are five mistakes to avoid if you want to create a full picture of the customer journey.

1. Don’t guess what the customer journey looks like – Make sure you can capture the complete view of your customer interactions

Most organisations only analyse a small proportion of customer interactions – typically between 1% and 3%. Without analysing every interaction, it is impossible to identify the complete customer journey. It is also not possible to pick up on trends and identify possible problems or opportunities.

Capturing and analysing 100% of your customer interactions will not only provide a picture of the whole journey but also enable a company to improve regulatory compliance and, if needed, prove adherence. It enables agents to upsell and cross-sell and helps managers to identify when coaching and training is required.

For organisations to accurately understand, map and optimise their customer engagement, a comprehensive, automated omnichannel, customer journey analytics platform is required. This technology provides your organisation with the ability to optimise every type of interaction.

For example, you could analyse how 100 agents tried 25 different ways to sell a product. Then you could identify the five best paths to a ‘close’ that delivered the highest level of customer satisfaction. Then you could significantly improve conversion rates by sharing those best practices with every agent. That is true customer journey mapping and the key to customer engagement.

2. Don’t get lost between channels – Make sure you have a single point of access to data from all interactions

To be able to deliver an optimum experience to your customers, make sure you can analyse all their interactions across multiple channels in one system that allows you to have a single point of access to data. This is important because in today’s multichannel world, it’s not uncommon for customers to use multiple channels to resolve a single issue.

Most vendors have developed their products for a single channel. They then bolt on extra applications to try and achieve a multichannel view of the customer journey.

For example, they provide separate analytics for social media and text. This means you are then forced to dedicate separate resources to each channel. If your analytics software doesn’t cover all the methods a customer chooses to communicate with you, vital pieces of information will not be available when an agent needs them. One missing interaction could be the difference between creating a loyal customer and losing the customer forever.

Our platform has been built from the ground up to analyse multichannel interactions. By converting calls into transcripts and ‘ingesting’ the transcript into a database to enable detailed analysis, Eureka is able to treat any text-based ‘channel’ in the same way – whether it’s a call transcript, web chat, SMS, email, forum, blog or survey.

So if you decide to add web chat to your contact centre, or use Twitter for key customer interactions, the content from all these interactions can be analysed using the same analytics solution. This saves time and cost and delivers a much better view of the optimal path to the desired customer outcome.

As a result, you are able to get a true overall picture of your customers and drive better engagement at every touchpoint of the customer journey – across phone, email, chats, tweets, etc.

3. Don’t stop at multichannel – Think omnichannel!

If you want to deliver a great customer experience and create loyal customers, it’s important to identify ALL the touchpoints between the customer and the brand. This goes beyond the traditional multichannel approach to create a full omnichannel engagement for a 360-degree view of the customer journey.

Imagine that a customer visits a shop, sees a promotion and orders the products online. When she calls the company to ask about the progress of the order, she‘s told to go back online as the full order tracking is available there. She is annoyed by the inefficiency and shares her frustration on Twitter.

Without technology that can link up all those interactions, it is impossible to understand what went wrong to make the customer unhappy. By understanding the point of departure by, in this case, identifying the sentiment in a social media post, and then connecting it with other interactions, it is possible to understand and improve the experience as a whole.

It is then possible to look at the impact of each interaction and how it affects the outcome of the entire journey – this is true omnichannel analysis. This is very important if you want to increase customer loyalty. You may find that contact at one touchpoint is spoiling the whole customer experience. Or you might spot ways to make small improvements at every step of the journey. Without this complete picture, it will not be possible to improve the whole customer experience.

4. Don’t make business choices based on an incomplete picture of your customers – Build  customer profiles based on their interactions with you

It goes without saying that companies need to know their customers, their channel preferences, pain points, history with the company, etc. CRM systems and feedback surveys provide helpful data. But they don’t provide a complete picture of service or other preferences.

By analysing every interaction, you can build comprehensive customer profiles that include customer behavior across channels. This information about how customers interact with a brand enables you to target marketing campaigns and allocate budget more effectively.

The more accurate these profiles become, the more you can drive customer engagement in and beyond the call centre. This will save you time and money because it will allow you to identify possible trends or necessary process improvements. It will also enable your agents to improve the quality of engagement along the way, regardless of the channel used.

In fact, the CallMiner Churn Index showed that 41% of customers want organisations to provide a self-service facility so they can resolve their own issues without waiting.

By analysing every interaction, you will understand why people use each channel. You can then provide the right resources to meet those needs. And you can point them in the right direction to use the right channel at the right time.

5. Don’t assume happiness at one point makes for a happy customer – Make sure you measure the satisfaction at key touchpoints AND for the entire experience

If you only measure customer satisfaction based on individual and randomly selected interactions, how do you know:

• How happy a customer is with the entire experience you deliver?
• Was the customer happy before a bad experience?
• Has the satisfaction level changed after you made up for a bad experience?
• What if a call with an agent looked like it ended satisfactorily but is followed by a tweet proving it didn’t?

If you don’t capture and analyse all interactions in a single platform you will never fully understand the true “voice of the customer”.

Start a better customer journey today by analysing all your customer interactions, across channels.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of CallMiner – View the Original Article

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Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.