Customer experience management (CXM) software vendor Merkle has released The Complete Customer Journey Analytics Handbook which outlines the key components of the proven strategy for customer journey optimisation.
Delivering great customer experiences has always been crucial to building loyalty and advocacy, driving more interactions, and increasing revenue.
The discipline of customer journey development has been ever so important for many organisations, more so with the rise of first-party customer data and the deprecation of third-party cookies. The handbook explains how designing customer journeys should no longer start with subjective customer views, but should rather be rooted in data.
Using first-party customer data is essential for businesses to better understand and then deliver real-time and privacy-safe experiences for consumers across channels. The Customer Journey Analytics Handbook includes six crucial steps in the cycle that businesses must take into account when it comes to their CXM practice:
- Connect and enhance data: The most foundational aspect of customer journey design lies in the ability to identify, collect, synthesise, and act upon multiple dimensions of data attributes.
- Define the data-driven journey: CX analysts and designers should translate the data into insights that are forged into actionable business strategies and tactics.
- Devise a test design and contact strategy: This allows an understanding of the measurement framework, strategy, and KPIs used to explore theories that yield an optimal combination of messaging, creative, and tactics to drive desired customer actions.
- Operationalise: Operationalising analytics brings data across the customer journey to life.
- Apply real-time decisioning and optimisation: Decisioning technologies are at the core of the intelligent layer that allows brands to orchestrate all customer interactions across touchpoints and over time.
- Measure: There is a difference between “reporting” and “incrementality,” and learning how to adequately implement both will help avoid a wasteful path.
Shirli Zelcer, head of analytics and data, Merkle Americas, said:
The idea of creating a phenomenal customer experience has continued to be top of mind for marketers across industries. However, many marketers miss the powerful opportunity of developing data-driven, actionable customer journey.”
“Merkle was recently recognized by Forrester Research as a leader among the top customer database and engagement agencies and received the highest vendor score in the analytics services criteria1. We’re proud to have written the Customer Journey Analytics handbook to provide marketers guidance on how to leverage next generation analytics and actionable steps for building and planning their customer journeys.”
