As the customer takes center stage in every industry, a transformational shift in the way businesses interact with customers is vital. With customer experience now becoming more important, the key to increasing customer loyalty is understanding the customer journey, mapping it correctly, and optimizing processes around for effective acquisition and retention of customers. A great start to devising an effective customer experience strategy is by working with the right tools; the Dynamics 365 customer journey offers a unified platform that enables businesses to quickly and easily engage with customers, empower employees, and improve service levels and responsiveness.
Not sure if you are ready to take the next steps towards Microsoft Dynamics 365? Here are 5 reasons that you should consider before moving forward.
What is the Customer Journey?
The primary goal of any organization is to constantly sign on new customers, in order to grow the business, revenue, and profit. As a result, sales and marketing teams come together to deliver the best possible buying experience for prospective customers; this includes mapping out the journey that the prospect will travel while engaging in the buying process. Creating a customer journey enables you to clearly understand how prospects progress from discovering your business, to learning about your product or service, to evaluating their options, and finally making a purchase.
Every interaction a customer has with your company, product, or service constitutes the customer journey. When a customer buys your product or service, it is a result of all the interaction he/she has had leading up to and following the purchase. According to Forrester, “The customer journey spans a variety of touch points by which the customer moves from awareness to engagement and purchase”. Developing a seamless experience that ensures each touch point interconnects and contributes to the overall journey is essential to ensure customer satisfaction.
Customer Journey in Dynamics 365
As businesses engage potential customers, Dynamics 365 streamlines the process by which customers start discovering a product, evaluate whether it meets their needs, look for a good offer, and finally make a purchase. The Dynamics 365 customer journey helps you guide your employees through the process by using automated messaging, activity generation, interactive decision points, and more. You can either simply identify a target segment and create a simple email campaign that addresses prospects of that segment or go out and create a detailed customer journey that helps you plan, automate, and monitor the entire journey as prospects travel from discovery, through nurturing, and on wards to becoming qualified leads.
- Choose from a variety of customer journey templates with pre-made structures and get started quickly.
- Build a collection of contacts or segments grouped according to some common attribute or explicit assignment.
- Schedule follow-ups and trigger workflows around marketing initiatives, decision points, or internal action items.
- Drag and drop tiles and create unlimited custom workflows, assigned to specific segments of contacts.
- Automate each stage in the journey to execute a step such as sending an email or closing a deal – either through scheduling, or when triggered by a particular customer action.
- Create and run online surveys and integrate them with your events, marketing emails, and customer journeys.
- Create inbound customer journeys for entirely new and unknown contacts that register for a newsletter, share your social media post, or engage with you through any platform.
- Invoke custom workflows at any point in the customer journey and advance a process stage, create alerts, and more.
- Create LinkedIn campaigns and sync your LinkedIn campaigns back to Dynamics 365.
- Get a real-time view of all the planned activities with respect to any customer engagement including phone conversations, emails, and meetings.
- Create leads and link it to the contact who created it or to the account that the contact belongs to.
- Get insight into contact interactions: from how many interacted with an email to how many did not engage as well as your journey’s performance in the form of dashboards.
- Set up recurring journeys to reprocess all contacts at regular intervals.
Standard Customer Journeys and How Dynamics 365 Optimizes Each Step
The best way to enable a seamless customer journey is by making customers happy at every touchpoint –before, during, and after the purchase; identifying the various touchpoints and offering customers what they need is extremely important for customer loyalty. Let’s look at the basic steps in a standard customer journey and how Dynamics 365 helps optimize the journey at each touchpoint:
1. Awareness
The awareness stage is when buyers identify their challenge or opportunity, they want to pursue and discover your business as an option that can fulfill their challenge.
Dynamics 365 allows marketers to generate leads across multiple sources like emails, LinkedIn, webinars, and events. If a prospect has been looking for a particular set of services, you could send them an email, offering just what they need. With contact information that is always up-to-date, you can easily take your leads into Dynamics 365 and create insights from your campaigns to increase effectiveness. This allows you to create content that targets the right people at the right time using the right campaigns, which in turn creates better conversion rates.
2. Consideration
The consideration stage is when buyers have clearly defined the goal or challenge and have committed to addressing it. They evaluate the various approaches or means available to achieve the goal or solve their challenge.
With Dynamics 365’s marketing automation, you can choose from a host of different ways to nurture leads: create a marketing list, one-time email, weekly offers or monthly newsletters – you can send personalized messages at timed intervals to keep customers in the loop. By entering prospects into the list, you can choose the appropriate means of communication to start their customer journey.
3. Purchase
The purchase stage is when customers make the decision: to buy or not to buy. The focus here is on the price, the ROI and the value proposition, and customers will more than likely want a face-to-face interaction at this stage. They also want to be assured that with the purchase, they have made the best decision.
Dynamic 365 enables sales professionals to track the most important information about the sales process: from notes, opportunities, quote documents, and invoices to the signed documents. This makes the purchasing process much easier for customers as they receive the right information at the right time. Advanced personalization reflects a customer’s order history, their preferences and other details that help increase engagement. You can use this data and turn it into actionable insights to make improvements and strengthen customer relationships. The lead management tools intuitively help track, score, and nurture leads more effectively.
4. Retention
In today’s service-oriented world, the customer buying process does not end with purchase. Retaining customers is far more important, but unfortunately many organizations end their relationship at purchase, when the customer is looking at a long-term experience with implementation of the product or service, and with after sale support.
Dynamics 365 enables you to offer the best possible experience throughout the customer journey leading up to ongoing service, and after-care support, ensuring you have a long-lasting relationships with your customers. It allows you to set follow-ups, and provides reminders and alerts to proactively engage with customers. Personalized email messages at regular intervals help deliver content in the form of news, offers, events, and other related content. Track every little detail about customers and have all customer related information in one place for easy traceability. And capture timely customer feedback through surveys to assess performance and take corrective measures.
The Road to Success
With customers becoming more informed and connected than ever before, the balance of power has shifted. Organizations no longer have control over their relationships with customers; it is the customers who are calling the shots. So, ensuring every customer experience is exceptional throughout the lifetime of the relationship has become imperative; this includes completing a journey map for each stage of the relationship – awareness, consideration, purchase and retention in addition to ongoing service as well as after-care support. Dynamics 365 enables you to create customer journeys from scratch by choosing from a collection of templates. Using the Dynamics 365 customer journey, not only can you only engage with customers across various touch points, but also continuously track and monitor each engagement to persistently improve customer experience and increase revenue and embark on the road to success.
