A Journey to Great Customer Experiences

As a marketer or customer experience pro, do you really know how prospects and customers interact with your brand? This isn’t a trick question. The answer is you probably do.

Your data and analytics tell you where, when and how individuals interact with your site or mobile app. It indicates what they’re buying or downloading, what they say on social, which ads they click on and what questions they’re asking in-store or call center staff.

But knowing a bunch of data points in a vacuum is one thing. The big challenge for marketers and CX pros is connecting all of this knowledge to make it actionable.

You want to understand the pathway your prospects are on, then use that knowledge to deliver targeted, one-to-one personalization that keeps individuals moving forward.

For many brands, this is the unrealized dream of omnichannel marketing.

Despite heavy investment in martech, and voluminous data, they cannot respond appropriately to each customer with the right content, offer or experience, on the right channel at just the right moment.

Challenges of True Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing in the context of a customer’s journey isn’t as easy as has been promised for a number of reasons. Marketing teams often use a bunch of martech systems that aren’t connected (marketing automation, social media tools, email marketing solutions, and even in-store systems), or they use a marketing cloud or suite, which in itself is a bunch of disconnected marketing technologies.

Furthermore the customer data is often not unified, typically living in disparate systems that fail to provide a complete picture of each customer.

With marketing tech working independently, it’s impossible to support a cohesive experience for customers as they move across brand channels.

As a result, brands end up with an incoherent, inefficient marketing or customer experience program - a disjointed mess of marketing technology, customer data and many different touchpoints that are incapable of saying the right thing at the right time to your customers.

Connecting the Customer Experience

Customer journey mapping isn’t a new concept or practice in mature marketing organizations. Using white boards and sticky notes to literally map the journey across a brand engagement has been around a while.

But technology to optimize the customer journey and unify customer data, connect marketing technology across channels, and trigger the right offer or content at just the right time is just now starting to be widely adopted by brands.

This is the vision and the capability behind Acquia Journey, our customer journey orchestration solution. This SaaS offering can help any brand overcome common challenges uniting data and channels, and open up new opportunities to engage, convert and build loyal customers.

This includes triggering custom emails when a visitor leaves your site, showing an ad on Facebook that’s in-context, or replying in real time to a complaint on social media with just the right help.

Acquia Journey is not a replacement to your existing martech and adtech. It’s complementary because it provides the connective glue across all of these systems, so they can act together.

It doesn’t replace all your data sources, instead it unifies all your customer data in a central profile for a complete, real-time picture of each customer.

Moreover it also adds a powerful, smart orchestration engine to make your customer journey strategy come alive. With full, situational awareness of your prospect/customer activity, your channels of interaction, and the technology driving them, Acquia Journey orchestrates and triggers the best possible action or offer in real time, so individuals receive relevant information that drives them to the next step of their journey.

The opportunity in 2018 is to harness this data to really understand and leverage all this information.

If you do this, you can trigger and deliver on-point content and offers to cut through the noise, eliminate off-target attempts to engage customers, and meet the unmet promise of omnichannel marketing -- delivering the right content, offer or experience at the right time, to each individual.