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What’s Ailing Your Journey?

Jim Tincher Jim Tincher 04/23/2020

During these challenging times, I’ve been posting weekly videos on LinkedIn, sharing best practices on how customer experience (CX) pros can ensure their companies come out of this pandemic in a position of strength. We’ve also created a LinkedIn group, Managing the Coronavirus Experience (the Other CX), for you all to share your own tips.

As I mentioned in my first video in the series, it’s important to talk with team members at least weekly. That’s true normally, but even more critical in times of stress – such as now. Yesterday, during our weekly check in, Marcie, our content strategy director, mentioned Kinsa digital thermometers.

Deploy Digital Detectives

If you haven’t heard about them, they’re part of the Internet of Things, applying online connectivity and intelligence to a digital thermometer. The connected thermometer feeds your results – and the results of hundreds of thousands of other people – into an online database that uses that information to track temperature anomalies across the country. Normally, a high incidence of fevers aligns with the incidence of seasonal flu outbreaks, but since fever is one of the most common symptoms of coronavirus, it appears to also do a good job spotting COVID-19. Since current spikes are outliers compared to baselines established by previous years’ flu-related results, the findings are now being used to track the spread of the virus, helping governments and healthcare providers predict where the next hotspot is likely to be.

First, isn’t that cool? I love it when new technology can help solve problems elegantly.

Second, wouldn’t it be even cooler if you could do this with your customer experience? Find a technology that warns you when things seem to be heating up?

I’ve got some good news for you: that technology does exist today. The bad news? (There had to be some, didn’t there? Wouldn’t be 2020 without it.) Most companies aren’t using it.

Identify Trouble Spots

The technology is journey analytics, and like the coronavirus, it’s exploding. (But in a good way.) Journey analytics platforms ingest your operational data and show where customers are getting stuck in your journey. This capability pairs nicely with journey mapping: the journey map shows how customers feel during the journey and where they’re encountering friction, and the analytics system lets you know just how many are getting stuck, and how.

For example, if a new form on your website is causing customers to bail, the system will show you that in real time. Pushing a new welcome kit that’s confusing customers? The system will show how many are failing to provide their personal information.

Yeah, it’s cool. But that’s not the half of it.

The best systems also include orchestration capabilities, which help you to automate recovery. You can automatically send an email to those customers who bailed before filling out their personal information to see if they need help or want a rep to contact them. You can A|B test response rates for different versions of that welcome kit to see which is most effective. And at the very same time, you can also be tracking calls, to make sure you don’t accidentally drive up call volume with your emails or texts.

Embrace the Future of Journey Management

We spoke about combining journey mapping and analytics/orchestration in our April 21 webinar, which was based on recent white paper we co-authored with Usermind, an innovative journey orchestration platform. For those endeavors, we focused on the onboarding journey within the context of the banking sector. But the concepts we explored apply to a broad spectrum of industries, so no matter where your focus is, we hope you’ll check it out and let us know what you think.

Journey analytics and orchestration have the potential to change the way we manage and improve journeys, just as Kinsa thermometers have the potential to change the way we track and respond to disease outbreaks. And there’s no better time to optimize the way we monitor either one.

For more information about those game-changing thermometers, check out the Kinsa website. As an added benefit/incentive, for each thermometer purchased there, Kinsa will donate one to a family in need. (We’re not affiliated with the company in any way, I just enjoy promoting new technology, especially when it has the potential to save lives.)

Hang in there. We’ll get through this.

 

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