Feature
The Gist
- Real-time precision. RTIM enables moment-specific customer engagement.
- Enhanced personalization. Hyper-targeted experiences elevate customer journeys.
- Omnichannel harmony. Seamless integration across all user interactions.
Real-time interaction management (RTIM) is reshaping the way brands think of customer journey orchestration. RTIM makes a previously unheard of level of real-time personalization possible. With RTIM, disjointed cross-channel experiences have evolved into frictionless omnichannel customer journeys. This article explores how RTIM is transforming customer journey orchestration through precisely timed interactions and hyper-personalized experiences.
Understanding Real-Time Interaction Management
By processing customer data as it arises, brands can engage users in real-time during micro-moments across channels. This shifts passive one-way communications to interactive two-way engagements using contextually tailored messaging. Customer journey orchestration is a method used by businesses to design, manage, and deliver personalized customer interactions across various touchpoints and channels throughout the entire customer lifecycle. RTIM allows brands to interact with customers at specific points in the customer journey when they are most likely to make a purchasing decision.
Max Ade, CEO and co-founder of Pickleheads, the digital home for pickleball players, told CMSWire that the more targeted your marketing efforts are, the better ROI you'll get. "RTIM can help brands increase their engagement rates and get more people to take any given action by using real-time prompts,” said Ade. Ade gave an example of a brand that is trying to close a deal using RTIM to tell shoppers how many of the items they have in their cart are left. “This makes them more likely to take the desired action,” said Ade. “Because the marketing is more focused and less wasteful, it forges a higher return on investment and ensures more efficient use of resources."
RTIM changes the way that customers interact with a brand. For a travel app, it may mean offering a room upgrade promotion when a frequent customer books a new trip. Rather than reactive and generic, marketing becomes anticipatory and bespoke. Early adopters have seen substantial lifts in conversion rates, revenue and satisfaction.
Campbell Tourgis, executive vice president and COO at Wainbee Limited, an engineered systems solutions provider, told CMSWire that if a customer abandons a shopping cart on their ecommerce website, RTIM can trigger an immediate follow-up email with a reminder or a special discount to encourage the customer to complete the purchase. "As a result, timely and relevant interactions improve the overall customer journey, increasing the chances of conversion." RTIM positively impacts the customer journey by enabling businesses to deliver contextually relevant messages based on real-time customer behavior.
RTIM operates as a sophisticated decision engine that harmonizes customer data and analytics to deliver optimized customer interactions across various touchpoints in real-time. It begins by aggregating data, which could include a customer’s demographic details, transaction history, browsing behavior and interactions across channels. This consolidated data forms a comprehensive customer profile.
John Nash, chief marketing and strategy officer at Redpoint Global, a CDP platform provider, told CMSWire that the ability to provide that kind of personalized customer service across all of a brand’s channels seamlessly and in real-time requires the use of technology that unifies all of the data throughout the customer journey. Many brands are turning to CDPs as the primary source of the unified data they use for the RTIM that enables personalized real-time customer interactions across a brand’s touchpoints.
A recent Harris Poll commissioned by Redpoint revealed that 39% of those polled said they would not do business with any company that fails to offer a personalized experience. "The brands that have found success in the past two years (and are continuing to succeed now) are largely the ones that prioritize personalization at scale, adapting to the fact that consumers are now increasingly in control of their experiences, their data, and more, and expect high degrees of personalization." Nash said that despite the growing complexity, consumers expect not only that a brand recognizes them across every channel, but that every interaction is relevant to where they are in a customer journey.
This real-time aspect is crucial; as a customer interacts with a brand — be it through a website visit, mobile app, or a customer service call — the system updates the profile instantly, reflecting new information that can influence the customer's journey. RTIM uses predictive analytics and machine learning (ML) algorithms to interpret this data, anticipate the customer’s needs, and determine the next best action. This could be a personalized product recommendation, a tailored promotion or proactive customer support.
Then comes the orchestration component, where RTIM directs these actions through the appropriate channels, whether that’s email, web, app, or in-store interactions, ensuring the message is consistent and contextually relevant. This coordination must be seamless and occur in milliseconds to be effective, as delays can result in lost opportunities or negative customer experiences.
The success of RTIM relies heavily on the sophistication of its algorithms and the quality of the data it processes. It's a complex system requiring continuous tuning and testing to ensure it responds appropriately to the myriad of customer journey paths and potential interactions.
Related Article: Why Real-Time Feedback Is Crucial for Modern CX Strategies
RTIM's Impact on Customer Journeys
When it comes to engaging customers, timing is everything. We've all had the experience of getting a promotional email right after making a purchase, rendering the offer useless. RTIM helps avoid such frustrations by enabling brands to interact with customers at precisely the right moments throughout their journey.
Scott Opiela, CMO at Acoustic, a customer-obsessed marketing technology company, told CMSWire that RTIM flips traditional marketing on its head. "Today, marketers broadcast messages to their audience in an attempt to push them toward a specific goal like conversions, which can frustrate customers and make them feel misunderstood. With RTIM, marketers can act in the moments that matter—the moments when customers signal that they’re ready to purchase.”
Rather than blasting batch campaigns on rigid schedules, brands can now activate personalized communications triggered by a customer's real-time actions and context. This takes journeys from passive and reactive to interactive conversations. Customers feel understood as brands deliver tailored offers before they even ask.
RTIM provides insights to smooth out pain points in journeys as well. Bottlenecks such as complex account signup processes can be identified and improved. By coordinating messaging across channels, disjointed experiences transform into unified omnichannel journeys. With RTIM, brands engage customers proactively during micro-moments that matter most. This deepens loyalty as customers feel valued through highly relevant experiences. Essentially, RTIM turns customer journeys into a dynamic two-way dialogue rather than a static, one-way broadcast.
"If a bank has a goal to get more auto loans, marketers may push this to their audience with various messages, on different platforms. But if marketers can see which customers have been reviewing auto loan rates on the bank’s website, they can act in real-time to deliver a personalized message that resonates because it’s based on purchase intent rather than the bank’s growth goals,” explained Opiela, who added that customers are fickle and if marketers miss that moment, they’ll orchestrate a journey that doesn’t make sense to the customer.
Related Article: Real-Time AI: A Necessity for Great Customer Experiences
Brands That Are Using RTIM for Customer Journey Orchestration
Brands using RTIM for customer journey orchestration are often at the forefront of personalized customer experiences. Here are a few examples that have successfully used RTIM to improve and enhance their customers’ experiences:
- Amazon uses its recommendation engine to provide real-time product suggestions based on customer behavior, browsing history and purchase patterns. This is a form of RTIM where immediate data is used to curate a customized shopping experience.
- Starbucks leverages RTIM through its mobile app by delivering personalized offers and recommendations to its customers. It also uses purchase history to predict and suggest orders, streamlining the customer experience.
- Netflix similarly employs RTIM to personalize content streams and recommendations, ensuring that what is presented to the viewer is aligned with their preferences, which are inferred from their viewing history and interaction data.
- Bank of America employs RTIM to provide a personalized banking experience for its customers, using real-time data to offer financial advice, product recommendations and fraud alerts.
These companies have integrated RTIM into their customer journey strategies to create a more seamless and personalized experience, driving engagement, loyalty and increased sales. They've achieved this by investing in the technology needed to process large volumes of data in real-time and applying sophisticated algorithms to make instant decisions that resonate with individual customer needs and preferences.
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Challenges and Considerations of RTIM
On paper, RTIM seems incredibly powerful. But actualizing real-time engagement at scale comes with very real challenges. Firstly, all those customer data sources — apps, websites, IoT devices — must seamlessly integrate, which is a major technical hurdle. The data itself needs to be comprehensive and accurate to power contextually relevant interactions. Fortunately, there are technological innovations that have evolved to be able to unify real-time data at scale, such as CRMs and CDPs.
On the customer front, hyper-personalized messaging based on individual data raises unavoidable privacy concerns that brands must handle transparently and ethically. There's also the challenge of orchestrating relevant omnichannel journeys versus disjointed messaging. The more customers, the greater the challenge to deliver tailored real-time interactions at scale becomes.
Final Thoughts
Real-time interaction management marks a monumental shift in customer engagement, from generic and reactive to tailored and proactive. By processing individual customer data as it arises, RTIM enables brands to choreograph anticipatory journeys through precisely timed, hyper-personalized interactions. The future of customer experience will be driven by brands that progress from merely reacting to actively orchestrating relevant, valued conversations.
