Customer journeys are personal journeys. We experience the world through the lens of our subjective beliefs and attitudes. The events and encounters we have throughout our individual histories make us who we are and influence what we do. Our public persona gives way to the truth of who we’re connected to, what we want, and where we are. Our progress through the world is particular to us, and marketers need to understand how they fit into our journeys when to complement them, and when it’s appropriate to disrupt them.
Good Data Management and Customer Experience
Before embarking on a shared journey, it’s good to know the person you’re traveling with. The best way to learn about someone is to have a conversation, but that’s not possible on the scale of modern marketing. Instead, you have to learn about people through their data. We’re fortunate to operate in an environment where lots of data is available.
Yes, a reality of our modern world is that there is often an overwhelming volume of data. It’s messy, and it’s scattered hither and yon across many sources, management systems, and repositories. To get what you need from the information available to you, it’s important to have a data strategy.
Using Data For Customer Journey Mapping
A data strategy is the collection of capabilities, practices and standards that maximize the quality and utility of data. While each brand develops a strategy based on its unique array of available sources and potential purposes, we see some common objectives. Here are a few examples.
1. Optimize Data Collection
Identify all your methods for capturing information or acquiring it through external systems and sources
2. Break Down Data Silos
Remove the barriers, both technical and operational, that cause your data to reside in different systems or in structures that can’t interact
3. Improve Data Coverage
Develop procedures for identifying gaps in data and replace missing values with information from another source or with default values
4. Normalize Values
Create consistent representations of data when they’re captured or managed in different forms across various sources
5. Standardize Entities
Determine how you will represent common entities – individuals, households, businesses, etc. – that are important to you and connect them across silos
6. Establish Relationships
Connect different entities that have the ability to affect or influence each other across the various sources
7. Codify Implications
Define what the data means, its importance and its use in business operations to ensure consistency
Across all these practices, there needs to be a strong commitment to governance. Remember, you’re creating a data strategy to facilitate a journey with people. You can be sure they expect you’re going to protect their privacy. They want you to honor their preferences and need to feel secure with you. Data governance is a critical part of your data strategy, and its tenets should form a set of guiding principles that inform everything you do, including building customer journeys.
Key Consideration for Providing a Data-Driven Customer Experience
With a data strategy in place, you have the insights to develop the various customer experiences that make up a journey. It takes many steps to get from one place to another, whether you’re walking to a store or your favorite restaurant or you are guiding a person through a generalized sales funnel. The journey is a series of experiences that a person has with your brand, and data can give you some perspective on which experiences to provide, the timing and sequence as well as the qualities of the experience. The data will help identify conditions that create guideposts along the customer journey.
Embarking
First, identify the people who will be on the journey with you. Find people who aren’t customers and look at their known attributes to determine whether it appears they would like your brand and what appeals to them.
Discovery
When those people start to find you, reinforce the messages they’ve received and observe the interactions they have with your content to create additional insights that make the experience more personal in the moment.
Directions
Follow up with new messages that put them on a new path based on the observed behavior. Couple those insights with data about the journeys similar people have taken and give them a new direction that urges them to stay on the journey.
Crossroads
The path will lead them to a point when they have to make a choice. Present experiences based on data that suggests their various motivations and help them create new frames of reference.
Roadblocks
The path isn’t always easy. Confusion and indecision may be parts of the experience, but the data indicates reasons to keep going and provides reasons to move beyond the condition that is blocking a decision.
Decisions
Finally, the journey comes to an end. Your traveling companion chooses to join your brand or not. The conclusion isn’t certain, but a well-thought-out journey with effective experiences along the way puts you in the best situation for the decision to go in your favor.
No journey is perfect. Your exquisitely planned journey, supported by insightful, high-value data, can be interrupted by someone who is ready to jump ahead. If your journey is constructed with great data, you’ll have the ability to pivot and respond to new signals, providing experiences that demonstrate how much you know and care about them.
If you are looking for help with your data management strategies, Acxiom can help. Reach out to us at [email protected].
