Escape the Acquisition Trap: Prioritize Customer Experience After the Sale

A customer journey management (CJM) system improves CX at every stage of the customer lifecycle:

• Discover (research products and services)
• Buy (purchase products or services)
• Onboard and deliver (receive purchased products, activate cards or services, schedule medical appointments)
• Use and manage (change account details, report suspicious behavior, receive alerts about suspicious behavior)
• Support and resolve (pay bills, return a purchased product, schedule service appointments, receive proactive outage notifications)
• Grow (receive targeted offers, renew and upgrade contract)

CJM improves CX by:

Determining customer needs. Customer journey analytics tracks and measures every interaction with your brand, helping you understand customers' needs, interests and behavior. Journey analytics allows you to personalize customer experiences based on who customers are and what they need at any given moment.

Delivering effortless experiences. Timely, relevant reminders, alerts and notifications make it simple for customers to pay a bill, report suspicious account activity or confirm a medical appointment.

Communicating with customers via their preferred channel. The CJM system sends notifications via the channel(s) on which the customer is most responsive.

Taming communication chaos. By combining digital communication with a decisioning engine, CJM sends the right messages at the right time, without sending too many or irrelevant messages. A customer-centric approach means helping customers complete their task, without sending messages to push the business's agenda. If a customer is reporting an internet outage, help them diagnose and solve the problem. Don't try to sell them an upgraded package while you have them on the phone.

Providing proactive, preemptive customer service. Contacting customers before they even know there's a problem pleases customers and reduces contact center calls. For example, immediately notifying customers about an internet outage in their neighborhood, and providing frequent status updates, prevents the frustration of calling the contact center, waiting on hold for 20 minutes, and then waiting four hours for the technician to arrive.