If you know what is CRM or Customer Relationship Management software, a customer journey is something that tells the stories of your customer’s experience with your brand, beginning with their initial contacts and continues through all succeeding interactions, via all touch points in the CLM CRM software.
Therefore a marketer using CLM CRM (Customer Lifecycle Management CRM) software platform’s job is to understand the various touch points when the customers get engaged with the organization, respond to marketing messages, purchases its products,and services, to make certain the most successful usage of each such chances and opportunities.
Unlike, traditionally established marketing funnels, which were linear, modern interactions with the customers at each stage of the funnel, can jump around from one stage to another, even at times skipping particular stages or trace backward in a typical customer’s journey through the funnel.
80% of all sales, occur after approximately 5 followups- Gartner Click To TweetNevertheless, the goal of managing and defining customer journeys include the customer experience with the brand, identify the greatest potentials and dangers in the various stages of the journey, and make certain that every customer receives the right message via the right channel, at the right time.
Most markets before the intrusion of Web 2.0 in the CRM world used a flowchart-based or map-based customer journey approach, one that enabled the marketers to take advantage of the customer journey through the funnel to plan their actions in order to maximize customer engagement and satisfaction. These customer journey frameworks were built using data-driven researches that were capable of expressing the most critical and important stages of the most common journeys of the customers and how to best engage the customers at each one.
However, the traditional flowchart based approach had numerous limitations which made it unsuitable for managing the journeys of most of their customers, such as:
-Journeys were static
Although pre-planned customer journey frameworks could cover the paths that customers take, traditional customer journey approaches failed to address unusual or unplanned customer behaviors.
-Limited flexibility
As pre-planned customer journeys could not cover every scenario, traditional customer journey approaches left many customers behind as it treated customers too generally.
-Assumed a single journey for all customers
Using the traditional flowchart based customer journey mapping approach, it was extremely difficult o manage or modify or combine different journey maps, since many customers deviated their behaviors from one path to another during their journey.
Therefore traditional journey mapping of the customers simply did not work with individual customers in the context of their actual behaviors, activities,and preferences.
Hence, in the modern times with the advent of CLM CRM software technology, with easy to use CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub that offers 360-degree view of the customers and their unique touch points, a far more comprehensive, complex and newer customer journey mapping approach that is gaining popularity among advanced marketers is taking a different track.
In this approach instead of pre-planning the customer journey (that a customer might take), this modern micro-segmentation approach centers on enthusiastically segmenting very much alike customers on their comparable ‘behavioral DNA’.
Actually, these micro-segments of customers (which can even be just one or two customers), who matches a set of criteria defined by the marketers; is utilized to map the customer journeys in real-time using a CLM CRM software platform to maximize this information for customer satisfaction and engagement.
The factors that define this modern approach in mapping the customer journey can include a combination of factors, such as:
Now, since every customer in your easy to use CRM database must fall into any of these micro-segments at any point of time, all customers will receive the most relevant and appealing offers and messages at the particular point in their never-ending customer journey through the CLM CRM software, which is the main rewards of the ‘micro-segmentation’ approach to manage customer journeys.
The key benefits of using the micro-segmentation approach for managing the customer journey using best small business CRM software like ConvergeHub, which is also considered as one of the most popular CLM CRM software platforms, are that micro-segmentation approach is:
-Adaptive and Dynamic
Because customers are treated based on the micro-segments in which they are presently located, individual customer journey continues to adapt itself to changes in the behaviors of the customers in real time.
-Easy to evolve and scale
By just including more and more micro-segments (for catering more effective communication) the number of customer journeys handled can increase exponentially, without having to restructure anything that was built before.
-Enhanced customer coverage
Focusing on myriad customer micro-segments enables the marketers to easily cover numerous customer-related events and scenarios collected in the CRM database , without being limited to imagining and planning out pre-defined paths in advance.
-Greater volume of customer marketing
Because none of the customers are left behind, the micro-segmentation approach for monitoring customer journey helps to blast relevant messages to individual customers, or groups of customers, using marketing automation in the CLM CRM software, at every point in their journey.
Creating the Ideal Customer Journey Model using CLM CRM software
Therefore, unlike traditional customer journey flowcharts, which simply present a fixed number of actions along the path, dynamically micro-segmenting very similar customers on their ‘behavioral’ DNA helps in creating an infinite customer journey which is more challenging to visualize and communicate.
In other words, using a CLM CRM software solution, (as the adage goes, “there is more to it than meets the eye”), micro-segmenting the customer journey often provides more value in what you can see than what you could not have seen using conventional journey mapping of the customers.
Therefore, using a CLM CRM software, the micro-segmentation approach does not compel the marketers to consider “hard-coded” journeys, but instead using this approach marketer only need to take into consideration and attend to the customer’s above stated “behavioral DNA” at any specific and exact point of time, without worrying how the customer reached that point.
Conclusion
Finally, the use of this micro-segmentation approach becomes even more robust when it is combined with predictive analytics software, which helps in sending offers to customers based on what it appears that they are going to purchase in the near future, which aids in up-selling and cross-selling to the customers in the CRM database , boosts your brand’s image, and increases your revenues.
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