The Journey to Next Best Experience

BUILDING NEXT BEST EXPERIENCE PROCESSES

Building processes that incorporate customer’s context will strengthen the experience and allow for personalization. In the context of next best experience, personalization allows you to create the next best experience for each individual, not simply the average next best experience for all profiles. By connecting all of your data and channels, you can make sure that consumers don’t repeat experiences unnecessarily and aren’t shown irrelevant information.

THE ANALYTICS BEHIND NEXT BEST EXPERIENCE

Many businesses are using analytics after the fact, like a vacationer reflecting on a trip that they’ve just completed. For a business, this kind of approach is a good start, as it provides an overview of what experiences have worked in the past . Unfortunately, this approach often means only being able to change things after it’s already too late.

The answer, both for the vacationer and for your analytics, is to incorporate intelligent predictions. By looking through the windshield as they drive to the next destination, a vacationer can steer the car away from potholes or better, towards a great experience that they might not have know would be on their path.

Instead of only looking at data in hindsight, which is most helpful for reporting, taking a predictive analytics approach can improve your entire process. Analytics should be done before you strategize, while you’re designing strategy and process, and long after your project goes live. To prove value most quickly, listen to your channels before implementation and perform a process of journey discovery. Find out which journey paths are leading customers from best experience to best experience, and feed that information back into your strategy and process planning.

THE REAL POWER OF NEXT BEST EXPERIENCE ANALYTICS

Every business will need to ask themselves, “What is the most important data to capture?” The answer is that longitudinal, behavioral, intent and satisfaction data are the most useful when starting out. Anything that can tell you about the customer across time will have more value than data that provides a snapshot of a single instant. By comparing customers’ behavior, intent and satisfaction data across time, you can create a three-dimensional picture of how customers move through their interactions with your business. This then feeds in directly to your next level of strategy and process building.

FINAL WORD

Next best experience seems like a simple concept, but delivering it every time you interact with every customer isn’t easy. Marketers succeed at next best experiences when they can lay out the data in a consumable, understandable way. Then, they can compartmentalize the logic and processes to drive changes to the experience.

Finally, marketers can automate journeys to see the results and measure the impact of their NBE planning. It may seem like a significant investment to go through the process of designing new strategy, building out processes, and continuously performing analytics, but the results speak for themselves. Improvements to CX directly result in higher revenue and increased long-term satisfaction.