Creating great customer experience journeys to retain and generate new business opportunities

Delivering a great customer experience through automation is always rewarded and, in this article, I'm going to explore how you can create successful customer journeys to build client advocacy.

Consider a potential customer's first interaction with a new supplier. This is likely to be as an inbound website visitor following a click through on an internet search result, webchat, social media post or outbound email. Invariably this visitor will be a team leader with either direct purchasing power or, at least, influencer status. Typically, initial website visitors are researching information to stay abreast of emerging industry trends and/or solve a specific operational problem. Tapping into this need is the first step to securing an initial engagement and an opportunity to initiate a successful lead nurturing process. Providing access to content tailored specifically to this audience is the first step in delivering a great customer experience. Tracking how visitors are interacting with your content is vital to developing new content, nurture existing leads and attract new leads. If successful, this complex chain of lead interaction needs to be scaled through automation. This is where content management and marketing systems add significant value.

The next interaction point for marketing qualified leads, is the sales department. Sales out-reach via phone, email or B2B messaging platform (such as LinkedIn) needs to be in context of the prospect's specific interest which is derived from the knowledge of their previous website activity. The sales team need to demonstrate an excellent understanding of the subject matter and quickly provide additional details in the form of a quote or proposal. It should be possible to provide this information via email or messaging application within minutes of the initial contact using prebuilt templates. Of course, some proposals will require additional presales engagements and it is important this process be managed by electronic presales support cases to ensure a timely customer response. All of these sales interactions require automation to ensure potential customers do not become frustrated by unnecessary delays. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are an ideal tool to facilitate the sales engagement process.

Customer quoting is also the ideal opportunity to drive prospects to you customer portal for the first time. A highly functional, great looking customer portal is one of the best sales tools in the client engagement arsenal. Initially customers should be able to view all proposals, statement of works and quotes in the portal and give the option to electronically accept and digitally sign these documents. Once the prospect becomes a client, then the portal will also provide access to sales order history and invoices, in addition to the operational information providing customers with a engaging experience which will drive retention, up/cross sell opportunities and advocacy.

Consider the customer journey from the moment they place an order as illustrated below: 

Transition management automation onboards the customer to the necessary systems required to deliver the procured products and services and minimise the time to revenue. Provisioning and workflow automation is linked to ordered product codes with documentation such as the statement of works seamlessly flowing through from sales to operations. Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) and line of business operational systems are then all configured for customer product and service delivery including activities such as billing, project management and support.

Ongoing, customer visibility of demonstrable products and service delivery is an essential element to retaining a long term, strategic relationship, with your clients. A highly functional, attractive customer portal will play a major role in this regard. The portal provides a central location for customer stakeholders to organise their supplier interactions. Importantly, portals should never replace telephony, email, messaging or in-person engagement options but provide an overlay capability to track interactions between the supplier and their customers. 

Let’s consider some of the features of a great client portal. First, the portal needs to be exceptionally easy to use with an uncluttered and modern user interface. Here are some points to consider:

• Easy access - ideally, the portal will launch from a centrally installed laptop system tray icon, browser favourite or mobile application with single sign on (SSO) authentication; users should not need to hunt for the support website link and remember unfamiliar access credentials.

• Role based content delivery - only deliver relevant content to specific users. For example, desktop users may only need access to ticketing and knowledge base but customer project managers will need additional access to professional services content and service managers will require access to managed services information.

• Content customisation will be required to reflect different service subscriptions. Service catalogues, dashboards, KPI reports and forms should all be customisable per customer.

A fully operational portal should, at least, include the following content:

• Commercial – this content provides access to proposals, quotes, sales orders, invoices, and payments. 

• Professional Services – used to track transformation projects. This area should provide an information and collaboration workspace experience for project stakeholders and include data such as budget burndown, Gantt timelines, Kanban boards, resource bookings, project tickets and issue logs and project documentation such as statement of works, transformation and product requirements. 

• Managed Services – used to track service contracts. This section should include: service agreement burndown, price and service entitlement details,   flexible incident & problem ticketing and service request catalogue including automated service orchestration and customer satisfaction tracking.

An important function of the customer service portal is to facilitate the supplier's internal operational efficiencies. Consequently, tight integration to back-office CRM, ERP and operational line of business systems is essential. Natural Language Processing (NLP) will play an increasingly important role in customer support; augmenting the customer portal experience with AI chatbots guiding users to relevant content in the portal and/or orchestrating service delivery on the users behalf. Finally comprehensive analytics will extract and transform information from all these systems, before normalising and loading a data warehouse so analytics can be visualised by management or processed by machine learning algorithms to drive operational efficiencies and new marketing campaigns. 

Conclusion

These are time consuming undertakings for busy leadership teams, so working with a CTO advisor with relevant experience of building successful customer journeys will prove immensely valuable. However, many companies cannot justify the expense of a full time CIO/CTO on a six-figure salary. If this is the case in your business, why not explore the option of working with a fractional CIO/CTO. These are part time, C-suite technologist who can provide strategic advice and guidance for a fraction of the costs of a full time equivalent. For more information, visit www.digitalselection.co.uk or book a no-obligation 30 min introductory call here