Editorial
The Gist
- Customer journey transformation. AI has turned customer journey maps from static tools into dynamic, hyper-personalized experiences.
- Persona integration. Incorporating multiple personas into customer journey maps allows for deeper personalization and better customer understanding.
- Data-driven insights. Real-time data and AI enable brands to refine customer journeys, offering tailored experiences at every stage.
I remember the first time I participated in building out a customer journey map, a critical tool for understanding the customer journey. It was as simple as it gets. An easel, markers and piles of sticky notes.
The result was a single persona's customer journey, focused on researching a toy purchase for a special occasion for their child. It was driven by internal personnel from marketing, merchandising and a couple other store support departments. Interestingly enough, the need for a journey map refresh was based on the emerging impact of the internet.
The Evolution of Customer Journey Mapping
Conspicuously absent was any real feedback from a customer, customer-facing employees or anyone from their information technology department who was responsible for their website content.
When I consider journey mapping from 20 years ago, I realize how much has changed. Organizations had access to limited data sources, teams created maps in siloes, the maps were manually produced and were very operational with not much focus on the emotional aspects of the customer journey.
Most significant, they were static and focused on a specific touchpoint — not really the entire journey.
Related Article: How AI Is Revolutionizing the Customer Journey in 2024
From Static to Dynamic: The Modern Customer Journey
Compare that to today, where customer journey maps are dynamic, include omnichannel engagement and target a 360-degree view of customer engagement where emotion plays a role across all purchasing channels at all stages in the customer journey. This requires buy-in and input from the entire organization and from customers themselves.
In the past, the focus may have been at the drop-out points where the customer purchases stalled most frequently; today it covers every critical moment where the purchase can be interrupted due to pain points, emotions or competing attention. It aims for the ultimate personalized customer experience.
The Power of Personas in Personalizing the Journey
One of the biggest differences between then and now is that we now have a variety of personas built into the maps. The extra step of identifying those personas and customizing the customer journey map for each of them allows brands to better understand individual customers’ journeys. This can help personalize the promotions that customers receive.
This actually has been happening for years, as retail brands learn more about segments of customers in a specific region or city, the offer on the store shelves is adapted. Then as smaller customer persona segments are identified, more personalized offers are made. Loyalty cards and similar mechanisms are put in place to further analyze customers needs, wants and customer behaviors and make customized recommendations.
Yet these efforts have all still been limited based on the number of personas that could be analyzed and information that could be stored about every customer. Online retailers certainly had an advantage by knowing most everything about their customers’ behavior with that online retailer. For even better clarity, the use of tracking cookies allows these retailers to track what happens to the customer after a visit to the website.
We can change the term “personas” to “customers” and see how we could adapt journey maps to take advantage of an endlessly increasing supply of data from various sources to create hyper-personalized experiences. Already there are journey mapping tools that bring in live survey data that can determine the current mindset of a customer. This can be incorporated with live updates to sales data.
Related Article: Customer Journey Mapping: A How-To Guide
AI and Data: Shaping the Future of Customer Journeys
With AI, customer discussions can be turned into a journey map specific to a single transaction. Maps can be interconnected to show multiple purchase journeys for the same customer. With all this information, the ability of service personnel and marketing teams to create a hyper-personalized offer for the customer is now in hand.
Operational data, combined with segment and customer persona information that is dovetailed into a system that contains attitudinal data captured from a survey, a contact center conversation or even a qualitative interview, can now be weaved together to make precise recommendations using past behaviors and predictive models. Recommendations can even pivot based on the unique employee that is serving that customer at the moment.
While it may seem like something from a movie set in the year 2054, the reality is that brands like Target are already providing their frontline employees with mobile devices that can help guide the employee into getting the customer to purchase more — and they've recently added AI in customer experience chops to those employees. The trend towards hyper-personalization can lead to bringing better offers to loyal customers who share more information with brands.
The reverse can also be true as well, and noted in a recent CNN article: “You’re not going crazy — you may actually be paying higher prices than other people.”
Challenges and Ethical Considerations
Companies are already using AI to limit offers and pricing concessions to customers where they already have confidence that the customer will continue to make purchases without the additional offers.
While the use of AI is just starting to emerge in the area of customer journey mapping and orchestration, it is poised to revolutionize the customer journey, with several advances expected along with — undoubtedly — consumer and regulatory pushback.
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Some consumers and governing bodies will see it as surveillance. Customers may see it as an invasion of privacy. Still, others might welcome discounted prices in exchange, while most brands will set it as necessary to be competitive.
One thing is certain — the customer journey is becoming more personalized than ever, thanks to the evolution of AI.
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