Better Insights Improve Customer Journeys

One bad consumer experience can cause a customer to stop using a product, which is why the customer journey revolution is taking center stage at smart businesses.

While customer experience analytics can rescue businesses struggling to effectively manage their customer journeys, real-time insights are needed to help brands correct their CX difficulties.

Customer relationship management firm Insightly in December unveiled its report on how businesses can keep pace with the evolving customer journey in 2022.

This report formed the basis of Insightly’s top tips to help companies address the changing customer landscape and other challenges.

Insightly recently launched an addition to its unified suite of CRM applications. Insightly Service is a customer service and support ticketing product designed to work seamlessly across the business apps that companies are already using to share data across departments in real time. This information gives all customer-facing teams more relevant conversations to help drive customer satisfaction and success.

The past 18 months highlighted the importance of delivering superior customer service. That starts with gaining a clear and real-time picture of the complete customer journey, including staying ahead of potential concerns, said Anthony Smith, CEO of Insightly.

“Businesses have the opportunity to differentiate themselves by ensuring they have insights that help them demonstrate knowledge and empathy in every single customer interaction. Our focus is on bringing together all of these touchpoints — from customer service to marketing, CRM, and project management, so that teams have a unified view of the customer experience to proactively guide customer success and strengthen long-term relationships,” he explained.

Report’s Insights

Insightly’s study asked more than 450 business leaders to assess the top pain points for their sales and marketing operations. Those responses showed that businesses are struggling to effectively manage the customer journey.

Respondents identified three key challenges:

• Lack of customer data transparency
• Difficulty in building and maintaining integrations
• Struggles with a rapidly-evolving toolset

The Insightly report found that more than four in 10 reported sales and marketing teams only connect on occasion or when necessary. Nearly one in 10 respondents admitted they do not connect at all.

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way customers interact with companies. As a result, the customer journey, which was undergoing a pre-pandemic transformation, is now evolving at a much faster rate, observed Smith.

“Businesses that want to build long-standing relationships with customers must ensure each touchpoint is fully integrated so that conversations are fruitful and connections are made,” he said.

Report’s Top Tips

Insightly’s leadership team compiled its top tips to help businesses succeed in 2022. Based on the report, key factors involve unity, better content presentation, improved team alignment, and fixing worker morale.

Sales is a team sport. All aspects of the process — from marketing to sales to post-sale — need to be unified to deliver a white glove customer experience, according to David Osborne, chief sales officer at Insightly.

“In 2022, businesses will need to ensure the commitment of all departments to deliver on its promises to the customer and provide personalized, relevant content,” he said.

Insightly offered these tips to put those goals into action:

• Unify all aspects of the sales process to deliver a white-glove customer experience, including personalized, relevant content.
• Focus on thoughtful, authentic content with seamless sales and marketing integration to create a holistic customer experience.
• Team alignment is critical in a remote/hybrid work world to create seamless customer experiences and meet their expectations.
• Employee morale is critical to your business’s success in the wake of the Great Resignation — think outside the box to retain and attract the best talent.

Conflicting Insights

Another recently-released related study Insightly commissioned and Zogby Analytics conducted revealed that 86 percent of businesses believe they meet or exceed customer expectations. However, only six percent of consumers feel a company’s customer support team exceeds their expectations.

This second Insightly survey polled 300 business decision-makers and 1,000 consumers. The results showcased the disparity between how well businesses think they are doing with customers and how customers actually feel about their experiences with companies.

Source: Insightly / Zogby Analytics

Customers are most frustrated when they perceive they are being ignored by a business. Nearly one in three say they switch providers if they are unhappy.

Business management, however, sees their CX performance much differently. Nearly all business decision-makers polled believe they are aware of their customers’ level of happiness with them. That includes 73 percent who reported being very aware.

Source: Insightly / Zogby Analytics

Heavy Social Media Impact

Perhaps the most damaging discovery the Zogby report revealed is consumer outreach via social media. Complaining about a company on social media is by far the most adverse thing an angry customer can do, according to 56 percent of business leaders responding to the survey.

That is significantly worse than complaining to customer service and taking time from the team, noted 23 percent of business respondents. Choosing a different provider resulting in a loss of their business had an almost equal serious impact on their companies, noted 21 percent of the responding business leaders.

Demographics reflected a narrow range of responses on the impact of social media consumer comments.

Complaints on social media worry female decision-makers (61 percent), decision-makers in the South (67 percent), and those in companies with fewer than 500 employees (65 percent).

That compares to males (50 percent), decision-makers in the West (46 percent) and East (48 percent), and survey respondents from companies with more than 500 employees (46 percent).

In contrast, an overwhelming majority of business decision-makers (86 percent) believe that their company meets or exceeds customers’ expectations most or all the time.