It is obvious, you always need an improved customer journey to accelerate your business. By business acceleration, we mean faster growth and more margin in a defined period of time.
We call “Customer journey“ the entire path customers follow while:
- discovering their own needs
- searching and finding a solution
- negotiating and agreeing on a contract for the solution
- put the solution into operation
- experiencing the solution
The entire journey is a sequence of interactions that your customer performs with your people or your systems. In my last article, I elaborated the topic of human interactions.
In this article, I want to focus on the interactions of your customer with your systems. Let us call the system your client directly interacts with your “customer experience systems” and the systems by which you operate your company your “digital core”.
A flawless customer journey needs a well-designed and efficient interaction of your customer experience systems with your digital core.
Here are a few examples:
- Customer master data for invoicing, payments and other operational procedures
- Order data used for reservations
- Stock status according to location, quantity and inventory forecast
- Pricing as a function of quantity, time, customer, campaign, currency, etc.
- Delivery data as a function of quantity – can be split in different bundles or combined with other shipments, pick and pack, assignment of shipping point, routing towards the customer, papers for customs and returns management
In any case, the distribution of work between the customer experience system and the digital core for an optimal customer journey has to be decided and implemented.
In the market, we are seeing generally two approaches. Some IT-service companies are more focused on the customer experience systems and some are more concentrated on the digital core systems.
At Agile Networks Technologies we are convinced that you need both competencies for an ideal customer journey. Thus, we developed our service portfolio to be able to implement both of them.
In case you are interested in a further exchange, I am happy to follow up.