along with it. This is an exercise that addresses how customers interact with all the company’s systems throughout their journey—the relationships between the customer journey and your company’s stack of technologies. The purpose of this six-step exercise is not just to identify how those technologies are affecting the customer experience, but to build a roadmap for making technology improvements that will optimize that experience.
These are the six steps in that process:
1.Understand and map the customer lifecycle.
2.Define customer engagement strategy at each step of that lifecycle.
3.Survey and assess existing tools and approaches.
4.Assess the maturity of your supporting processes.
5.Assess tools, technologies, and internal processes with regard to engagement strategy and technology landscape.
6.Develop the implementation roadmap based on enterprise maturity and high-value areas of opportunity.
The process begins with understanding the customer lifecycle.
Start at the Highest Level by Mapping the Customer Lifecycle
This is the first step in creating a high-fidelity journey map. Ask yourself, where do customers come from? How do they go from not knowing anything about your product or service to becoming a loyal, repeat customer and market advocate? Answering these questions leads to mapping your customer lifecycle.
What are the stages your target customers experience, such as learning about your organization and value proposition, determining which products and offerings they need to evaluate, making a choice and purchasing your product, using the product, getting support, maintaining the product, and becoming an advocate? Each industry has prototypical customer journeys, but the precise journey will vary from organization to organization (see Figure 3-1). The nuances of messaging, engagement, experience, and interactions are what differentiate your organization and comprise the character of your relationship with your customers.
Figure 3-1: Industries’ Unique Stages of Customer Engagement
All these lifecycles have similar elements. If people don’t know anything about you, they need to be informed that you exist and that there is a reason for them to continue the exploration. Some industries call this stage “research,” others call it “learn,” still others call it “discovery.”
In the pre-digital era, the learn or discovery stages were mostly the purview of marketing organizations, whose job ended once the customer walked through the door or picked up the phone, responded to a mailing, and so on. Each subsequent stage was handled by a different department, and therefore issue resolution could require multiple handoffs.
Organizations are still structured in discrete processes, but with end-to-end digital experiences available, customers do not see the organization in this way. They care about solving their problem and don’t want to be bounced around from one group to another.
Define Customer Engagement Strategy at Each Step of the Lifecycle
This is the second step in the application of the high-fidelity journey map. At each stage in the customer lifecycle, you can differentiate your company from the competition with the positioning of your message, the approach to reaching your audience, the way you describe your value, the nuances of your message, and the character of the relationship.
Aligning the right content with an effective customer engagement strategy allows you to engage the customer at each stage of their lifecycle with content and information to move them down the path toward purchase or solving their problem. That’s what happened in my story about the Kamikoto knives—the marketers understood something about me through understanding my behaviors and they optimized their offers based on large numbers of experiments with people who exhibited similar behaviors to mine.
The right customer engagement strategy helps customers make a decision by providing exactly the information they need at that point in time, aligned with their mental model and vocabulary. Their mental model is how they think about their problem and how they think about solving it. Engagement happens on multiple levels and has various dimensions. Engagement is about meeting the user’s needs, which may be emotional or logical. It is dependent on their context and perspective. It can change from moment to moment and from step to step.
How can an organization anticipate and meet the needs of the prospect or customer with content data, knowledge, products, functions, or services? The first step is to describe the customer in terms of everything we know about them. This “customer model” is represented according to the ontology, and it changes as the user goes through their day. We can think about metadata swirling around us describing what we need and when we need it. If I am hungry and want pizza, that can be represented by elements in an ontology. If I am in the role of parent, boss, husband, or colleague, each of these can be represented by data and the ontology. We can use explicit descriptors: facts and history such as the products I own or where I live, or we can infer and derive data about who I am and my behaviors. These are the implicit descriptors that can either be predicted by other indicators or can be based on the knowledge or judgment of an expert (see Figure 3-2).
Figure 3-2: Customer Descriptors at Different Stages in the Customer Lifecycle
These descriptors tell our systems and technologies who we are at any given point in our journey and role, and what we may need at that point in time. Just like that great customer service rep who knows your needs and helps you solve your problem, the marketing technology engagement stack, informed by the ontology, can assemble messaging components and content aligned with your digital body language to anticipate what you need at each step of the journey.
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