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The next chapter in customer insight solutions: Automated journey mapping

Spoiler alert! If you’re not caught up on the latest installment of customer insight solutions thus far, you may want to read up on the digital customer journey examples from prior articles before forging ahead. When you are ready to continue reading this article, you will get an exciting sneak peek into the next chapter of customer experience insights.

Customer insight solutions for the future

Whether you are already using customer experience data or you are new to the idea of collecting and utilizing analytics of customer experience, this article is for you. As you probably already know, organizations need relevant, actionable data along with increased agility and responsiveness to meet customer demands. Regardless of what level of maturity your business has in the area of customer data analytics, it is time to look to the future.

Customer journey maps are about to get a whole lot better. Depending on how you collect and interpret customer journey data, a customer journey map may show all the touchpoints your company has with a customer and/or all the steps that customer has taken along the way to purchasing your product or service. It is a visual representation of cumulative historical data which is used to predict future customer behavior. Even if you have dynamic maps, the information can be limited by data collection guesswork.

How do you choose which data to collect, what is most relevant and actionable, and when do you collect it? With manual systems, you have to guess which data will prove most valuable. Your guesses come from experience and expertise. They are based on what you already know about your customers and your guesses on future behavior. This educated guesswork has served you well up to this point, and is a great place to start.

However, with the speed of change in the business environment, constantly shifting customer demands, and the limitations of guessing what customers might need, automations are becoming increasingly vital to business success. The next chapter of customer insights is automated. The next chapter of journey mapping is Automated Journey Mapping.

Automated journey mapping is the future

The future is automated, efficient, hassle-free, and right around the corner. Known as automated journey mapping, AJM is where customer insight solutions are headed. Manual journey maps have been a valuable contributor to the last few chapters of customer insights and solutions, and have provided a stepping stone to move towards fuller and more robust customer journey mapping through automations.

With automation, journey maps can be triggered automatically by an action taken by a potential customer. As the customer interacts with marketing emails, ads, pages of your website, and your mobile app, their journey can be mapped automatically. With enough data, patterns emerge, and different customer profiles become more apparent.

Which of your customers respond well to marketing emails? Which customers are more likely to interact with your business via mobile apps? Do they end up at your website after trying to use the mobile app because the app is lacking certain features they need, or do they give up altogether because of the app’s limitations? All of this is data you can use to improve the customer experience.

Tied in to data analysis tools, such as funnel analysis, Automated Journey Mapping can provide a well-rounded and dynamic picture of the journeys your customers are taking, which paths and patterns emerge, and where some customers get lost in the shuffle. With automatic triggers, AJM takes the guess work out of journey mapping and provides more robust, actionable data of the entire customer experience.