Connex One named 'Top Contender for Unicorn Status' in the 2023 Titans of Tech report Read More
New Product
Discover the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence and the benefits it has for your business.
Explore Athena
By Department
By Industry
Client Success | Old Mutual
Our goal was to incorporate the Omnichannel components of Connex One to assist us with efficiency goals.
Read
Featured Content
With our recent £93 Million Series C funding injection there’s no signs of slowing down in our mission to be the Customer Engagement Platform of choice.
Read our storyFeatured Content
Our goal was to incorporate the Omnichannel components of Connex One to assist us with efficiency goals.
Explore AthenaFeatured Content
Our goal was to incorporate the Omnichannel components of Connex One to assist us with efficiency goals.
Explore AthenaFeatured Content
Our goal was to incorporate the Omnichannel components of Connex One to assist us with efficiency goals.
Explore AthenaIn 2023, great Customer Experience (CX) is more important than ever for achieving business success.
Flow, our workflow automation and Omnichannel customer journey mapping tool, is here to help you design personalised customer journey maps, remodel them with ease, and automate them, empowering your business to achieve a better customer experience management and save time and resources.
In 2023, great Customer Experience (CX) is more important than ever for achieving business success. Flow, our workflow automation and Omnichannel customer journey mapping tool, is here to help you design personalised customer journey maps, remodel them with ease, and automate them, empowering your business to achieve a better customer experience management and save time and resources.
A customer journey map is a visual representation of all stages in a customer’s interaction with your business. The goal of this representation is to provide decision-makers (e.g. customer service directors) with a comprehensive view of what it is like to buy or engage with your business from your customer’s perspective.
When done right, customer journey mapping can help you to:
In this article, we’ll explain why it is critical for your CX processes to use customer journey maps that actually serve both your business’ and your customers’ needs.
We’ll also introduce Flow, our workflow automation software and Omnichannel customer journey mapping tool, all rolled into one. Flow will empower you to create complex customer journey maps from scratch, personalise them down to the last detail, and automatically action them, optimising your Customer Experience.
An accurate, well constructed customer journey map can be an invaluable source of information about what your customers like, what they don’t like, and the areas where your business can improve. As the data shows, that information is now more important than ever.
Today, 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products. 73% of consumers say a good experience is key in influencing their brand loyalties, and 9 out of 10 won’t purchase again from a company after three or even less poor customer service interactions (Source: Customerthink).
In a 2022 study, Hanover Research found that for 94% of businesses, customer journey mapping helped them develop new products and services to meet customer needs. What’s more, another 91% said that customer journey mapping resulted in an increase in sales.
The bottom line is clear: a personalised Customer Experience, reliant on a well-constructed customer journey map, is no longer just a “nice-to-have”; it’s essential if you want to stay competitive and retain your customers.
A customer journey mapping tool that allows you to construct well-informed, logical, personalised journeys will be your best ally to improve your CX.
“Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you.” — Mark Cuban
However, there are three common aspects businesses struggle with when trying to leverage customer journey mapping to optimise their CX. These are:
Customer journey optimisation is all about giving the customers more of what they want and less of what they don’t want. But to many businesses, it’s not always easy to find out what exactly these things are, especially when they are catering to many different types of customers and target audiences.
Quite often, the biggest difficulty businesses face after deciding to change their customer journey is to action those changes. Coordinating various departments and getting different teams used to new procedures can be a long and costly process, especially if your business lacks the best technology to facilitate it.
The purpose of customer journey mapping is to adapt to the customers’ preferences, and these can change over time. An ideal customer journey is not set in stone; quite the opposite, it should be made to admit any tweaks you might need, and it should allow for these to be made quick and easy.
Fortunately, Flow, our workflow automation software and customer journey mapping tool, can help you with all that. More on this later.
The right customer journey mapping tool will make it easier to construct a visual representation of your customer journeys.
This will be incredibly useful to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and gain a comprehensive perspective of what touchpoints they go through when interacting with your business, or to visualise new journeys that are more logical or customer-centric that you want to implement. However, that’s just the first step in improving your CX.
As we mentioned earlier, some of the biggest challenges businesses encounter when they try to improve their Customer Experience come when they try to implement a new customer journey. These problems usually stem from the difficulty of coordinating multiple departments and teams to adapt to new processes, which can often be quite complex in themselves. Not all customer journey mapping tools account for those challenges, and here’s where workflow automation can make a drastic change.
Flow, our intelligent workflow automation software and Omnichannel customer journey mapping tool, is here to help you with that, along with the rest of features in the Connex One Customer Experience platform. Flow is much more than a customer journey mapping tool: it’s a cutting-edge CX tool for planning, deploying and automating entire customer journeys.
After designing your journey and visualising it in an intuitive interface, you’ll immediately be able to put it to work, automating all customer journey stages across any channel and making any needed changes or tweaks in a matter of seconds. That’s another way our workflow automation software can give you an edge over your competitors: you’ll be able to adapt your CX strategies to new circumstances from the very minute you encounter them.
After onboarding with our customer journey automation solution, our clients benefit from a dramatic improvement in Customer Experience, resulting in a tremendous boost in customer retention, satisfaction, and conversion rates.
In the following section, we’ll explain to you how Flow works and how exactly it will help you to build and automate customer journey maps that serve you and your customers best.
Connex One Flow is designed by our expert team as a part of our Customer Experience platform to make designing and deploying personalised Omnichannel customer journey maps easier than ever.
Using an intuitive, code-free, drag-and-drop interface, you can dictate each and every step in the customer journey, with a comprehensive view of all touchpoints your customer goes through when interacting with your business. Then, workflow automation will take care of everything, sorting and directing all your interactions, saving your business time and resources.
You’ll be able to include any communication channel in the customer journey and link each touchpoint however you want to match your business and customer’s needs, making for a smooth, agile, personalised, and automated customer journey. Flow also allows you to pair up with our sophisticated Athena AI, taking your Customer Experience to the next level. More on this later.
After you have designed your Omnichannel customer journey, all you’ll have to do is put it in action. All steps will be completely automated and your customers’ queries will be automatically directed to wherever or whoever you choose, exponentially reducing wait times and allowing your teams to be more efficient.
With our Flow workflow automation and Omnichannel customer journey mapping tool, the design and deployment of your customer journeys is incredibly simple.
To get you started, there will be three categories of nodes you’ll be able to choose from: triggers, conditionals, and actions.
A Trigger is where any Flow starts in the customer journey automation process. To put it simply, a Trigger is where you specify a relevant input that will be the starting point for the automated customer journey, or, in other words, the way an interaction between your business and your customer will start.
Typically, Triggers will be some form of inbound communication, like a WhatsApp message or voice call from a customer, but they can also be an API request, a comment on social media, or the import of a contact via API. They also include specifiable outcomes of previous interactions.
With the next types of nodes, you’ll get to sort triggers further (for example, categorising different types of text messages by topic) and define how your business will respond to that Trigger.
Conditionals are one of the most crucial parts of our workflow automation software. Conditional nodes help route your Flows to different destinations. In other words, once a certain type of Trigger has been activated, a Conditional will check if the interaction meets certain criteria or belongs to a certain category, and then it will automatically route it to where it’s most pertinent.
There are several different types of parameters for Conditionals: you can sort interactions based on whether a certain keyword or keyphrase has been mentioned, on whether they meet certain rules, on whether it has particular tags assigned, on the input pressed by a caller after an IVR message, on whether a path has been reached a given number of times, and more.
Flow allows you to use as many conditionals as you want, as well as define their values or parameters with maximal levels of personalisation and precision. But that’s not all.
Among the Conditionals nodes, there’s also the option to throw our Athena AI in the mix. You can use it to capture information about a customer, transcribe the content or their call, or ask them questions via Live Chat to progress the interaction further. However, there are even more ways our AI can help you with customer journey mapping and customer journey automation, particularly on customer feedback collection. We’ll get to that in a minute.
Once you have defined how to categorise and sort your customers’ queries, you can move on to the last type of Flow node, which will determine how your business will respond to the customer.
An action is an interaction’s outcome in workflow automation. Action nodes determine the way your business will respond to a certain type of input or interaction from your customer.
There are almost 30 different types of actions, so the possibilities are endless: whether it’s sending an outbound message in any channel, moving a contact into a new data list, or closing an interaction, Actions allow you to automate any operation.
Other Action nodes allow you to capture CSAT, send a call to a ring group, or assign tags to an interaction so that it can be further sorted by a Condition later down the line.
These are the core aspects of Flow. Now, to see how that would work in practice, let’s examine a couple of models for customer journeys mapped and automated with Flow:
So, what’s going on here? Starting from the top, we see the first step in the customer journey automation, or the Trigger; in this case, it’s an email from a customer. What follows is the Action of an automatic response, but it doesn’t stop there.
Then, the Flow leads to a Conditional that checks for a particular keyword in the email’s subject; and if the subject contains keywords of a certain type, here named as “group 1”, the email is routed to the sales team. But if there are keywords from group 2, another further Conditional is introduced.
This Conditional examines if the email’s whole body of text for keywords; and if it includes a certain type of keyword, it’s routed to Support; if it contains a different type of keyword, it’s sent to Sales.
This type of automated customer journey would be useful for a business where there’s a thin line between sales and customer service territories.
A customer, for example, might initially reach out with a question about a certain product he has recently purchased; however, this might be a good opportunity to not only solve their query, but also introduce him to a new or different product that might make their experience more complete.
In this customer journey map, workflow automation would search for certain words or themes in a customers’ email and see whether the interaction only concerns customer service or whether the sales department can also make a move.
Let’s see another example. The next Flow relies on Athena AI to sort a customer’s query via text, making the process more agile.
In this customer journey map, the Trigger is a message sent by a customer sent via WhatsApp or Live chat.
Then, the customer is responded with an Action node in the form of a greeting message. After that, Athena AI automatically asks them a question: do they want to speak to a live agent?
If the customer says yes, they will be automatically directed to one; if not, AI will ask them if they prefer to log a call or check the status of their ticket, and then Flow will automatically proceed and fulfil their request based on their response.
Like we said earlier, there is more than one way AI can help you improve your customer journey. As one of the automated features in Flow, it can help you solve and sort queries faster, but that’s not all.
Athena AI is a polyvalent, versatile tool in Connex One’s customer experience platform that can help you improve your Customer Experience in a variety of ways. Now, we’ll consider other ways Athena can be of great help to compose a well informed, accurate, and actionable Omnichannel customer journey map.
As we mentioned earlier, customer feedback collection is often one area businesses struggle with when they try to build a customer journey map.
However, this is probably the most important stage of customer journey mapping; you’re trying to find out what your customers think at each customer journey touchpoint, what they feel, want, like, and especially what they don’t like.
You’re going to have to find out what are the most common pain points in the customer journey, what are some occurrences that can potentially become big pain points, and what existing areas of your customer experience need improving. The depth of your insights in this stage will determine how successful you’ll be in improving your customer journey.
AI can be your greatest ally for this task. Connex One’s Athena AI comes with a range of functionalities that will provide you with invaluable insights into what your customers actually feel at each touchpoint of the customer journey, helping you craft a more accurate, complete, and actionable customer journey map.
Athena AI Sentiment Analysis is one of our crown jewels: Sentiment Analysis will read your customers’ emotions from their tone of voice, inflection, and choice of words during calls with your customer service representatives. This will provide you with invaluable information into what’s really going on on the other side of the line, what your customers care about, and what pain points they are encountering.
Another tool you can use is Athena AI Entity and Keyphrase Analysis. This function of AI is designed to recognise the most common words, phrases, or entities (such as products or prices) mentioned by your customers when they interact with your brand. You’ll get a panoramic view of this information, which will be incredibly useful to spot what your customers think of and want from you.
Another way you can gather feedback with ease is to systematically send follow up messages or calls at the end of each interaction to gather customer satisfaction. As we have already seen, our Flow feature enables you to deploy those automatically upon query resolution.
To hear more about how our Flow Workflow Automation and Omnichannel Customer Journey Mapping tool or the full Connex One customer experience platform can help your business, contact us or book a free personalised discovery session. On average, our clients see a 133% increase in workforce productivity, a 60% increase in sales, and a 33% boost in customer satisfaction rates. Get in touch today and join the customer engagement revolution!
If you enjoyed reading this, you might also be interested in…
Customer Service Automation Software: How Flow Can Help Your Contact Centre
4 customer service agent frustrations that omnichannel can solve
Shaping the Future of Customer Experience.
