One of the biggest challenges in CCM is maintaining the same good experience across the complete journey, from the early stage of awareness and interest, via the sale or subscription to the experience afterward.
Customers don’t differentiate between your organizational layers, such as finance, logistics, services, production, or marketing. To them, you are one company.
Fixing the broken customer journey
However, the bigger the company, the larger the technological silos become to support each discipline.
These large organizations were never designed to be open and flexible, but safe, highly reliable, and productive. But when customers interact with these departments, they encounter completely different experiences at various touchpoints of the organization.
This leads to confusion, frustration, dissatisfaction, negative publicity, and more.
And so, as the customer journey spans all silos within the company, fixing the broken customer journey is a companywide issue – not a problem for just the marketing department.
This calls for IT solutions that can interact with systems within each silo.
What if it’s not that complex anymore?
It’s not surprising that new generation CCM solutions are now gaining traction due to their great interoperability and configurability.
Because the early CCM solutions are rooted in older or legacy IT systems, changes in design, content, or workflow are time-consuming, complicated, and costly.
A good reason to leave them alone if not necessary. This has now changed dramatically. The necessity has become quite evident in today’s fast-moving market environment.
The ability to connect with virtually any information system – using standardized APIs – has made the alignment of CCM and consistent CX in the customer journey more viable than ever before.
More engagement, better business
Automated interaction, based on events and accurate customer information, is a powerful way to engage with customers. The big difference is interaction in the moment: real time, instead of afterward or at intervals determined by the company. Based on closely monitored events, notifications can be sent to communicate alternative offers or additional services. Both sides can initiate contact and respond accordingly. This is not limited to opening hours – after all, customer experience is not limited to any time frame. Taking part in the customer journey requires organizations to be relevant and helpful when it counts, in the moment when the interactions happen, the question is asked or the need is expressed. If executed correctly, this will lead to increased loyalty of even believers who promote their incredible experiences to others.
Example: Hotels & Hospitality
As soon as a guest has made a booking, her specific data, retrieved from the PMS system, can serve as a trigger to connect other systems to check preferences and, if necessary, act on them.
The CCM solution can start a communication flow with personalized messages through different channels. This can be email, text, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp etc. In addition, external data sources can be accessed, such as the weather forecast to suggest outdoor or indoor activities. Or to send a gentle reminder to take an umbrella.
To make the guest’s stay even more enjoyable, a personalized landing page can be created for her to make arrangements when and wherever she wants. When checking in, you can offer extras or upgrades, and the system can ask for any preferences or extra information. The experience is even more enhanced when the data connects to other hotel systems. Think of automatically opening the parking garage gate, based on the guest’s license plate, or triggering a set of notifications when the key card is used to lock or unlock the door.
After departure, the communication flow stays open to thank the guest, ask for reviews, or promote another stay in the future.
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