8 ways to optimise the customer journey with customer lifecycle intelligence

A couple of years ago Aberdeen ran a fantastic webinar entitled Optimise the Customer Journey with Data-Driven Insight. 

The key finding of the Aberdeen study was that organisations are rich in data but insight poor – a finding that remains true in 2022. Capturing data alone is not enough, organisations must be able to take clear action from their data if they are to succeed. 

Best-in-class businesses using Customer Lifecycle Intelligence (CLI) enjoy superior results – as much as: 

• 39x improvement in customer lifetime value 
• 39% improvement in cross-sell/up-sell value 
• 2.6x improvement in customer satisfaction rates

In line with these statistics, and those from across the industry, our own experience demonstrates that businesses harnessing CLI are: 

• Reducing cost to acquire and serve by up to 80% 
• Delivering 300% more leads 
• Closing deals up to 86% faster 
• Increasing average order value by 50% 
• Increasing onboarding efficiency by 25% 
  

Turning data into actionable CLI is the vital ingredient when it comes to optimising the customer journey, and harnessing tools that drive insight-driven change is therefore key to helping your business succeed in today’s customer-centric world. 

In this blog I will give you 8 ways you can optimise the customer journey with customer lifecycle intelligence. But, before we get to that, what is customer journey optimisation and why do you need to do it? 

Defining customer journey optimisation 

Customer journey optimisation is the process of connecting and mapping customer interactions, across multiple touchpoints, to direct or influence the end-to-end experience. 

To do this well businesses must create opportunities for more personalised, relevant, and consistent messaging at every touch point with the customer. CLI is the information that informs the journey. 

8 ways to optimise the customer journey with CLI 

1. Build a single view of the customer

Creating a unified view of the customer is fundamental, and best-in-class organisations start the customer journey optimisation process by building a single 360°view of customer insights. 

By building a single customer view, front line teams are better able to understand how the purchases, interactions, and behaviours of customers will drive future actions. They can therefore target them more effectively with the most appropriate messages at the optimum time. 

This insight helps front line teams produce more effective strategies and campaigns, improves the quality of every engagement, and the crafting of relevant content that resonates with the customer agenda. 

It is important that this single 360° view is shared across the business and that everyone (from front to back office) understands the customer journey and how they can help shape customer experiences to optimise it. 

The implementation of advanced technologies, such as FullCircl’s Business Information Graph (BIG™) ingest billions of data points every day from a multitude of official and third-party sources, then matches and enriches these insights to unlock the most accurate and contextualised view of every customer– giving front line teams an up-to-the-minute view of what they need to know to build a 360° single view of the customer. 

Likewise, FullCircl Engage is powering the customer journey with enriched information, automating manual tasks, and providing touchpoints in the exact moment of need. 

Building a single 360°view is the foundation of customer journey optimisation, the benefits to name just a few being: 

• Tailored and timely communications 
• Deeper understanding customer needs, wants and preferences 
• Merging of understanding across the business 
• More beneficial relationships based on insight 
• More targeted product development 
• Greater value per customer through improved identification of cross and up- selling opportunities 

2. Do more with data – turn insight into action

It’s not the collection of data in itself that’s useful, it’s what you ultimately can do with it. 

So why does turning insight into action help optimise the customer journey? Here’s a three practical examples: 

• Find the right customers  – Make every customer your best customer.  Pinpoint your best prospects with ease and you acquire more of the right business customers with less effort in less time. 
• Onboard them faster - Easily implement your policies with our rules engine and onboard business customers up to 94% faster with automated KYC, AML, and credit checks. 
• Keep them for life - Identify and mitigate risks sooner, improve customer retention and increase upsell opportunities with in-life monitoring. 

 Translating data into CLI and enabling it to be turned into actions optimises the customer journey by delivering improved, personalised and contextually aware customer experiences that ultimately you do Better Business Faster. 

3. Maximise performance across all aspects of customer interaction

In the hybrid-working world we have endless opportunities to interact with customers, whether it be email, zoom, phone, social media, face-to-face, live chat, or app. 

According to McKinsey we now live in a ten-channel world. Today’s B2B customers are very clear about what they want: more channels, more convenience, and a more personalised experience. They want the right mix of in-person interactions, remote contact via phone or video, and self-service across the purchasing journey 

CLI is a key enabler when it comes to maximising performance across all aspects of customer interaction. Why? Because discovering useable information about customers is far less onerous. No longer do front line teams have to navigate into the depths of CRM systems and interpret some semi-relevant chart, instead CLI will simply sends you the specific information you want in an instant. Whether it be quantitative such as latest financial information, or qualitative such as an interesting nugget of information from social channels to kick start a new conversation. 

CLI offers the opportunity to analyse and curate relevant content from billions of sources to deliver usable insights to front line fingertips at exactly the moment they are needed, as well as providing a simple solution for acting on the information whether it be sharing the content across social media, sending a well-timed email, or setting up a Google Meet for a value-added discussion. 

The results for businesses optimising the customer journey by harnessing CLI to maximise the potential of every interaction are vast –  improvements in average handle time, bigger returns on marketing spend, high customer conversions and win-back rates, higher customer retention, and improved retention and upsell/cross-sell opportunities. 

4. Interact with customers in a more contextually aware manner 

Nothing will turn a customer off quicker than offering them irrelevant products or services. 

For any customer interaction to succeed it must deliver the highest degree of relevancy possible – it must be relevant to the customer need and what’s happening in their business right now, it should augment or improve their business and their relationship with yours. 

Importantly front-line teams must understand and demonstrate why the product or service will make a difference to the customer – why they need it, why it differs from other products or services they currently use or might consider using, any gaps in their business it will fill, how they will interact with it, how it will deliver value. 

True contextual relevance comes from having the power to determine in advance what a customer needs, and what product or service will have the greatest impact – from reactive, to proactive, to predictive! 

Prediction is a key front-line skill, and CLI is making life easier by helping to identify patterns of event types, market challenges, and new opportunities even amongst the longest term and best understood customers. 

Offering the opportunity to not only predict need, analyse what solution will have the greatest impact, and even the most likely response. 

The result – improved understanding of relevance and therefore enhanced ability to interact with customers in a more contextually aware manner and optimise the customer journey. 

5. Deliver consistent messages 

Customers expect and demand superior experiences on a consistent basis, businesses today cannot go to buyers with conflicting messages delivered by different teams running separate playbooks across multiple channels. 

Everyone needs the same view of the customer journey if they are to optimise it – that single 360° view again. Doing this without access CLI is going to be a challenge. But more than that it requires all parts of the business to work together, again technology is an enabler. 

Technology is rapidly transforming sales, marketing, business development and customer success alignment. Smart use of CLI tools can improve understanding of the customer, understanding to Total Addressable Market (TAM), improve lead segmentation, qualification and prioritisation, aid successful conversions and pinpoint new opportunities to engage and add value throughout the customer journey. 

But more than this smart use of technology can bring every part, and every individual within a business closer together and in doing so ensure they better serve the customer and optimise the customer journey. 

Best-in-class businesses are furnishing front-line teams with a single 360° view of the customer by ingesting and matching billions of data points and providing them with tools to consistently address customer needs at each stage of the customer lifecycle in order to anticipate enquiries and offer lightning-fast responses and recommendations, improve inbound and outbound, and boost customer success. 

6. Predict and model behaviour to map the customer journey 

CLI tools can enable front-line teams to construct models based on patterns of event types and customer attributes, that correlate more or less with eventual success. 

When they know exactly what the next steps are, they can better predict success and avoid failure, resulting in more sophisticated sales strategies, campaigns, and product or service development. 

As time goes by and the volume of data improves precision and predictive capacity, these models will advance, enabling faster and more accurate predictions of customer needs, pain, market challenges and opportunities – before customers themselves even realise what lies ahead – not just optimising the customer journey but influencing the direction of travel. 

7. Empower sellers – give them the insight they need to do their job 

CLI can help find the right customers, onboard them faster and keep them for life, and importantly reduce cost to acquire and serve. 

Utilising CLI tools to automate key activities such as information gathering, research on buying behaviours and trends, due diligence, leaves front-line teams free to undertake more strategic decision making and human-touch relationship building tasks with an even greater level of clarity. 

CLI helps sellers get more creative, make better management decisions, and spend more time doing what they do best – engaging with customers. 

Take a sales team of 200, each earning an average salary of £50k per year. If each spends a typical 14% of time every day on research and administrative tasks then that translates to £1.4 million in unnecessary costs to the business each year. Time and money that could be better spent optimising the customer journey. 

8. Gauge performance to exceed expectations 

A great front-line professional knows their strengths and weaknesses and finds ways to fill the gaps. 

They adopt new behaviours, seek out opportunities to direct their strengths to best effect, and learn how to manage their weaknesses to work in the best interests of the customer. 

They track their own performance and exceed expectations by analysing which aspects of customer interaction influence customer behaviour. 

CLI provides an ideal set of techniques with which to analyse and model the actions and outcomes behaviours with each customer, in order to pinpoint those which are most successful. 

Likewise, the same approach can identify the opposite actions or inactions that typically correlate with failure. 

This information can then be used to improve behaviours, correct mistakes, adapt selling style to each customer, and better align with customer needs. 

Start optimising the customer journey with FullCircl 

I’ve outlined eight ways you can optimise the customer journey with CLI. 

Forget standard customer data. We’ll bring you a multi-dimensional view that combines advanced data ingestion, validation and augmentation with real-time news, social signals and more. All neatly delivered via a web app or API. 
 
The end result for your business is that you can move fast. 

 FullCircl offers the perfect platform from which to start your optimisation journey – just look at the results achieved by BT Local Business as a result of embedding FullCircl CLI within their sales and business development strategy.