
The Journey to Next Best Experience

The “next best experience” is the ideal next interaction that a customer or potential customer should have. Consumers are desperate for clarity in the complex relationships between themselves and brands. In this cluttered environment, great experiences can be a breath of fresh air.
While CX teams have played a crucial role in making this idea central to business operations, today, it is primarily marketing teams being tasked with delivering communications and other channel interactions that become excellent customer experiences.
In this blog, we will discuss ways that marketers can consistently deliver the ideal next interaction and ensure the best possible outcome by using the right strategy, the right process, and the right data and analytics.
THE STRATEGY BEHIND NEXT BEST EXPERIENCE
Delivering the next best experience to each customer is a journey that begins with planning. In many ways, doing this planning is like someone preparing for a road trip and not wanting to miss any crucial sightseeing opportunity on the way to their vacation destination. To deliver a great experience, businesses must consider both what their customers need to know along the way to the goal they want to accomplish.
Just like a vacation planner, businesses need to consider what experiences will be appreciated. Doing this allows them to determine which will add the most value in the limited time available. This often starts with a customer journey map, which illustrates every pathway and touchpoint as customers travel along the customer journey.
NEXT BEST EXPERIENCE STRATEGIES THAT WORK
For the quickest value, don’t reimagine every touchpoint and every interaction. Instead, focus on how to seamlessly and positively get customers from one interaction to the next and to the ultimate goal.
What’s right for your brand matters—absolutely. But to drive the most value, your next best experience strategy must center around your customers’ needs and interests. This requires data and planning.
It is far less taxing on your resources to make immediate use of existing data using a federated model along with a modern customer data platform (CDP) . Together, these tools allow you to understand the context of customer experiences and act on that context immediately.
THE PROCESS BEHIND NEXT BEST EXPERIENCE
The next step in delivering the next best experience is building out automated processes to support your strategy efforts. Failing to do so is like planning all parts of a vacation except how you will get from place to place. To make these journeys a reality, advanced brands are using real-time interaction management (RTIM) and customer journey orchestration technology to sync channels, push and pull customer data, make decisions on best next experiences and then act to deliver them. To get the quickest value, focus on making sure data flows across channels and to improve part of the customer journey that often experiences customer drop-off.