Eight in 10 CX, analytics, customer care, and marketing professionals surveyed for a new report from Pointillist say that a journey-based strategy is very (39%) or extremely (40%) important to their organization’s overall success.
Respondents, more than 95% of whom have a customer journey-based approach to CX, also agree that a journey-based approach has had a positive impact on numerous business areas. These include identifying opportunities to improve CX (94%), aligning teams on the most important goals and metrics (92%), understanding key signals that lead to business outcomes (91%), establishing a single customer view (89%), and personalizing cross-channel experiences (87%).
So, what are marketers doing to understand and optimize the customer journey? Here’s what the survey reveals:
Approaches to Optimizing the Journey
In order to understand and optimize customer journeys, one approach utilized by about 6 in 10 (57%) CX and marketing professionals is customer journey mapping. The benefits of this approach are backed up by separate research from MarketingProfs, which found that mapping the customer journey is one of the distinguishing characteristics of more than half (55%) of B2B CX leaders.
Meanwhile, respondents to the Pointillist survey are also defining journey stages (51%) and journey-based metrics, KPIs and milestones (49%).
Other research shows that one of the challenges faced by enterprise CX professionals is creating multi-channel experiences, and Pointillist’s data indicates that close to half (46%) claim to be analyzing and optimizing each customer touchpoint and channel independently. A similar proportion (41%) also report analyzing connected customer interactions across three or more channels over time.
What Are High Performing CX Professionals Doing That Underperformers Aren’t?
To illustrate what practices are most effective in creating excellent CX, Pointillist separates the high performers from the average performers and underperformers. The company defines high performers as teams that are “very or extremely satisfied with their organization’s overall CX performance and the outcomes of their CX investments.” The report concluded that 26% of the respondents surveyed fell into this category, while 48% were considered average performers and 26% were underperformers (who were “not at all” or “not so” satisfied with their CX performance and outcomes).
The report reveals that high performers (92%) were considerably more likely than underperformers (64%) to say that a journey-based strategy is very or extremely important to their organization’s overall success. High performers (70%) are also more than twice as likely to have a dedicated role or team for customer journey management than underperformers (31%).
High performers are also far more likely than underperformers to integrate data across all tools and sources into a single, unified view of customers’ journeys (66% vs. 8%), analyze multiple customer interactions across channels and over time (75% vs. 10%) and engage customers with the right experiences at the right time through their preferred channels (72% vs. 10%).
With optimizing the customer journey being one of the key objectives to those organizations that use a data-driven strategy for decision making, it’s perhaps not surprising to see that high performers are about 10 times more likely to say that data is accessible and unified and is an integral driver in all CX initiatives (31% vs 3%).
High performers are also more likely to report being very or extremely satisfied with their organization’s ability to rapidly generate actionable customer insights (63% vs 9%), as well as their ability to take action on insights and customer feedback data to make a quantifiable business impact (59% vs 5%).
More details are available here.
About the Data: Results are based on a survey of more than 1,050 CX, analytics, customer care and marketing professionals, more than half (53%) of which work for enterprise organizations.
