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BEST PRACTICES & STRATEGIES

support customers in their decision-making. Businesses via chat or telephone must also be possible but this
need to consider that their sales and marketing mes- person must certainly know the complete customer his-
sages are just one element among many – and in most tory via the CRM system.
cases not the crucial one.
In every process step of the customer journey and at all
Making the purchase: in times of online shops and e- touchpoints, there must be control, a consistent
commerce, customers expect to be able to buy items "customer experience" must be provided, for instance,
they have decided on immediately. It is therefore crucial uniform and complete information that can be accessed
that the buying process works smoothly and that trans- around the clock, independent of the channel and in
actions can be done quickly and easily. A direct con- real-time. As always in digital projects, the basis for this
nection between platforms and social networks on the is high-performance hardware and infrastructure.
respective e-commerce sites creates clear competitive
advantages. Ideally, the online and offline worlds are In addition to performance and high availability, it is
seamlessly linked: if a customer does not want to buy a particularly important that the essential components are
product online, it must be possible to continue shopping not locked in silos. Otherwise, it will be difficult to keep
in a retail store. If this is networked with the online the customer experience consistent across different
shop, the salespeople know the customer's history and channels – for example for call centers, online shops
can suggest customized, additional, or service offers. and social media.

Integration of the service: a customer journey inte- Advanced solutions for the customer journey can evalu-
grates the downstream fulfillment processes into the ate the resulting data with predictive analytics and artifi-
process chain, because digitally oriented customers do cial intelligence in such a way that they can predict the
not accept delivery delays. Self-services are again an customer behavior. Because of such analysis systems,
important means of increasing customer loyalty and it is also possible to anticipate customer needs in real-
reducing costs at the same time. For service requests, time and to offer context-sensitive relevant suggestions
automated solutions can be used that can support cus- for the customer. ◊
tomers around the clock based on natural language By Daniela La Marca
processing (NLP), text analytics and predictive analyt-
ics. Of course, face-to-face interaction with a consultant

December 2021: Customer Journey Analytics 13