It’s the most wonderful time of the year—and also the most stressful. Pressure to find the perfect gifts. Crowded stores and parking lots. Mounting bills and credit card debt. Weather-related power outages. Cold and flu season. Shoppers are constantly contending with inconveniences that make the holiday season less joyful; their customer experience with a brand shouldn’t be one of them.
When it’s a hassle to deal with a retail store, bank, telecommunications provider or medical clinic, already stressed-out customers are easily fed up and quick to take their business elsewhere. Brands can ease customers’ nerves by guiding interactions to quickly and easily meet their needs. Journey orchestration (JO) decisioning is the magic that makes it happen during the year-end consumer chaos.
Unwrap CX Success With A Journey-Centric Strategy
Specifically, an intelligent decisioning engine ensures the most important journeys make it to the nice list. But these aren’t just any journeys, they are what we call microjourneys – the granular path a customer takes to a specific goal. Across retail, financial services, telecom, and healthcare industries, there are high impact microjourneys to sleigh before the year ends. In the spirit of the holiday season and inspired by the classic song, “The Twelve Days of Christmas”, here are twelve journeys to improve for customers:
Day 1: Browse and search
Holiday shoppers turn to online retailers in their search for the perfect gift. While some buyers hunt for a specific product, others prefer to browse different websites before settling on a purchase. After detecting research behavior and tracking purchase intent, the right journey orchestration platform can guide customers by sending targeted offers and triggering relevant marketing campaign promotions for the item that they plan to put under the tree.
Day 2: Create and add products to a wish list
How many times have you found an online item you love, added it to a wish list and then forgotten all about it the next day? Seasonal shoppers are no different. That’s where journey orchestration drives conversion by inviting customers to revisit their saved product collection, nudging them to complete the purchase after a certain amount of time has passed. The simple reminder can be enough to reduce cart abandonment and prompt a sale.
Day 3: Receive targeted offers
Customers don’t always know what they want until they see it. So how do retailers get targeted cross- or up-sell offers in front of their audience? By leveraging journey orchestration. Picking up on an online shopper’s real-time and historical usage behavior, an effective JO platform quickly determines if that individual is eligible for targeted offers—then follow up in their preferred channel. Before they know it, they’ll be buying a Ken doll to go along with that Barbie Dreamhouse they originally wanted.
Day 4: Pick up purchased products
All those online holiday shoppers eventually need to pick up their purchases in the real world. Pre-planning for this journey is key to making it seamless. Customers with successful orders benefit from automatic notifications that their product is available, along with upfront expectations and regular reminders of the pick-up deadline. The buy-online-pick-up-in-store journey is one that is here to stay and therefore must be mastered by traditional brick-and-mortar retailers.
Day 5: Customer feedback survey
Once a customer gift wraps their purchased product and gets back to holiday baking, their experience with your brand is the last thing on their mind. Bring it to the forefront with a timely invitation to complete a customer feedback survey. Not only does this help your organization gather critical insights on the customer experience—it also course-corrects negative brand interactions by initiating a call to the contact center following poor feedback.
Day 6: Report suspicious account activity
Not everyone wishes joy to the world on the 12 days of Christmas. According to the AARP, scam attempts are up 29% during the holiday season. That means that many consumers will fall victim to fraud—often without even knowing it. Fortunately, a financial services provider with journey orchestration capabilities can protect clients from the worst of the damage. After detecting suspicious behavior, the JO platform will be triggered to initiate an automated investigation call. The quick response prevents scammers from sneaking off with a head start, and the investigation follow-through alleviates the victim’s anxiety.
Day 7: Purchase devices, bundles and offers
What happens when your child’s favorite Christmas movie isn’t available on your existing network? You search for one that has it! Although many homes are hesitant to add yet another subscription service, holiday hosting can tip the scales. Reluctant customers may be further swayed with the assistance of a telecom company’s orchestrated journey. Once the system detects an abandoned cart, it will decide which channel and content combination is best to nudge the prospect toward completing. Ushering the customer through the bundle purchase micro journey is a win-win: you get the sale, and they get the content they want to watch just in time for Christmas.
Day 8: Exceed overdraft limit notification
In the haste to find everyone on their list a Christmas gift, customers may unknowingly spend beyond their means during the holiday season. Worse still are the fees incurred from exceeding overdraft limits. Avoid unhappy customer calls by preemptively warning escalating spenders that they’re approaching their maximum allowances. By orchestrating this journey, financial service providers have a better chance of preventing overdraft incidents—keeping customers happy and reducing the load on their call centers.
Day 9: Proactive service outage notification
Dreaming of a white Christmas? Winter storms aren’t always welcome during the holiday season. Snowfall, heavy rain and high winds can rip down power lines and leave households with unplanned service outages. But service providers with a journey orchestration system reduce customer angst by keeping them updated at every stage of service restoration. They can breathe easy knowing that their provider is aware of the issue and actively working to resolve it before Santa arrives.
Day 10: Schedule and manage appointments
Another Christmas crisis winter weather brings? Cold and flu symptoms. Emergency room visits spike during the holidays. Healthcare providers are stretched thin and would benefit from any extra assistance juggling their jam-packed schedules. Orchestrating patient appointment management relieves a huge burden for medical offices. The capabilities to confirm scheduled appointments or reschedule as needed help ensure the patients who need the most care can be seen, while appointment reminders and delay notifications allow patients to manage their own busy holiday schedules.
Day 11: Replace or return products
Not every gift is a perfect fit. When a customer realizes they grabbed the wrong size or color, their first move will be to initiate a return or exchange. Retailers with a JO system can make the micro journey smoother by nudging them through the process. After detecting the customer’s intent to return or replace a product, it will prompt the best path forward to right the wrong. Whether the replacement requires a home delivery or in-store pick-up, the swap will be an easy one if orchestrated properly.
Day 12: Ask about bills, services or charges
Hosting the holidays drains your energy—and raises your monthly bills. Constant phone calls, cooking for a crowd and powering Christmas lights all add up. But that won’t stop customers from experiencing bill shock when they see a spike in charges. Instead of fielding frantic calls to the contact center, organizations utilizing journey orchestration can first direct panicked customers to support pages that demystify itemized billing. If they still aren’t satisfied, they’ll be routed to an agent that can walk them through the unexpected fees. Better yet, customers can skip this step altogether if their statement incorporates a feature like Bill Explainer: an AI-driven solution that enhances bill comprehension for customers in real time.
CSG Xponent Orchestrates These 12 Journeys – And Many More
CSG Xponent Ignite, our customer experience solution, includes pre-built customer journeys for four industries: telecommunications, financial services, retail, and healthcare. The foundation of Xponent Ignite is CSG Xponent, our industry-leading, award-winning platform that includes a feature-rich and fully embedded customer data platform (CDP), customer journey orchestration and journey analytics to analyze customer behavior, sentiment and preferences and deliver a great customer experience.
