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How Micro Customer Experiences Are Becoming The Future Of Consumer Journey Mapping

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05/29/2020

consumer journey map

In 2011, Google coined the term Zero Moment of Truth, a customer’s first step in researching a product or service to purchase. Today, there are countless micro-moments involved in the digital path to purchasing behavior, and the most significant moments of truth may not be what many business leaders might think. 

Too often, customer success strategists, marketers, contact center leaders, and CX designers invest countless hours collecting a sea of data without a clear strategy for harnessing it to drive decisions. That leads to mental fatigue and a tendency to revert to assumption-based decision-making. According to the Harvard Business Review, nearly a third (31%) of marketers say they face the challenge of “too much data to analyze” when optimizing ad performance, for one example. Consumer behaviorists are swamped.

Is there such thing as too much data?

According to an IBM study from roughly 3 years ago, 90% of all the data in the world at the time had been created in the previous two years. With new devices, sensors, and technologies emerging, the data growth rate will continue to exponentially increase, creating an even bigger problem for a technical task that’s already difficult enough.

Ever google a question, only to stumble upon a self-proclaimed expert or “guru’s” advice that was of little value to you? With content and data being churned out at a rapidly exponential rate, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find accurate or actionable information used to help both businesses and customers make informed decisions.  

Read More: Special Report Series: State of the Voice Channel

The same concept applies to any abundance of content that’s difficult to sort through variables and generate predictions whether it be the web, a search engine, or a robust knowledge base: sports statistics, patient history, financial statements, legal documents, customer data in a contact center, and so much more. 

Companies today are swimming in customer data — data on their preferences, buying patterns, and much more. While sourcing all relevant data into one place can present brands with real challenges (or somewhat educated, general presumptions), in principle, every company has enough data at their disposal to create fairly detailed customer profiles. What's more, with the right strategic approach to analytics tools, you can even extrapolate from this data to generate maps of buyer journeys and ideal customer profiles for more effective targeting.

Identifying the key moments of truth

As you’ll see in our upcoming How To Guide on conversational AI on June 9th, sponsored by IBM: 

Consider the example of a smart home device company that sells a number of different products online. A customer might search for “home security systems” and click through to a security camera landing page, then navigate around the site and end up buying a smart lock after an unanticipated and extended period of research. The key moment of truth is all of the different micro-experiences a customer has with a given brand, whether it be ratings, reviews, automated customer assistance, or the design of a landing page; it shapes the customer’s impression of the brand and inadvertently encourages or discourages them to enter the next phase of action in the buying cycle. 

Each phase of brand perception, along with the buying cycle needs to be broken down into micro customer experiences to create the entire consumer journey map (for segmented target audiences). 

Read More: Special Report: Creating A Better Customer Experience With Field Service Management (Sponsored By Salesforce)

One of the greatest problems in customer experience right now isn’t necessarily not having enough data about our customers, it’s how we strategically go about aggregating it. What role does your chatbot play in the customer journey? How about conversion rates from a landing page or website design, social media ad, SMS customer support, etc.? These are all channels that create micro-customer experiences, informing customers about your business, and your business about your customers. These micro customer experiences cultivate the perception of the complete customer experience and should be independently factored into the consumer journey map. 

Generating optimal micro experiences

Say, for example, an outsized number of customers who participated in a social promotion go on to visit your product pages. Of that cohort, a desirable percentage goes on to complete a purchase. By treating each of those interactions–the promotion, the website, the purchase–as a journey step in your measurement framework, you can begin to recognize the journey flow and, as a result, it becomes possible to influence it for personalized experiences. More importantly, by identifying the journey steps that are most likely to lead to a purchase, you begin to compile your own storehouse of intent data to create a predictive model.

As Stacy Sherman, Forbes Contributor, Current Head of Customer Experience at Schindler Elevator Corp and former Customer Experience and Marketing Leader at Verizon recently told me:

..It’s important to use the vast amount of customer insight to make decisions and personalize those experiences. For example, if you consider a [successful] telecommunications company and you go to a website, they know who you are… it’s using that data to serve you up meaningful content so personalizing that content would be knowing you’re an iphone user, showing you iphone accessories, not android accessories.

As self-service trends such as search results for predictive and personalized offerings, Amazon-like recommendations, and automated data aggregation continue to rise throughout the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, segmenting, delegating, and analyzing each micro experience becomes increasingly important for the development of our consumer journey maps, customer experiences, and ultimately, Business Continuity Plan (BCP).

Read More: Annette Franz: Informing Your CX Strategy With Consumer Journey Maps

As Annette Franz, Forbes Coaches Council and CEO of CX Journey recently stated in a CCW Digital guest article

Journey mapping is the most critical and pivotal component in any customer experience transformation. An in-depth understanding of the experience today—what’s going well and what isn’t—is the only way to really drive change going forward. This is what journey maps provide and, hence, why journey maps and the journey mapping process are often called the backbone of customer experience management.

No one’s safe from the behavioral economic consequences brought upon by the coronavirus. But adapting to the right CX trends will give you the best chance at being on the favorable side of financial Darwinism. 

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For media coverage, lead gen, and digital marketing inquiries, contact me at matt.wujciak@customermanagementpractice.com.


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