Creating successful Customer Experiences (CX) that delight your customers and turn them into loyal customers is a lot like building a house, in that you must start with building a foundation for the house to sit upon. In any CX program, that foundation is data architecture, as data is essential to understanding not only who the customer is, but what the customer is doing and how they communicate. That same data even gives you a glimpse into why they are loyal to you.
Data Architecture Isn’t Just Analytics
There are analytics services out there that allow you to measure core key performance indicators (KPI), for example, new versus returning visitors, referral traffic, page loads, and time on site. Mobile analytics packages can measure the number of downloads, crashes, and screen views. Each are their own individual ecosystem of data, but your customer’s experience involves many more touchpoints than just the website or mobile app.
Strategic data architecture is much more than just the dimensions and events captured within an analytics package. In a strategic customer experience, multi-solutionists must account for touchpoint engagements from channels both online and offline. Examples may include a potential customer scanning a QR code on a bus shelter poster, or a brand-new customer downloading your mobile app to use their account, or even a customer calling the help line to resolve an issue.
Taking the strategic initiative to map, document, and then implement a data architecture that goes beyond clicks on a website or mobile application empowers you to build a customer experience that gives you a full 360-degree view of your customer’s experience. It involves a multi-solutionists, who are CX stewards understand how data collection and engagement work hand in hand, starting with awareness and identification all the way to engaging with potential brand ambassadors.
Integrating Offline and Online
Understanding where not only all your data comes from and is stored, but all the points anyone or anything related to your company touches a customer is the cornerstone of developing a strategically mapped data architecture. Without that understanding, you can miss out on integrating vital touchpoints and being able to provide the best experiences your customers are now expecting.
This integration isn’t limited to capturing online data. Connecting online data has increasingly become easier, especially with the advent of application protocols interfaces (APIs). Essential customer engagement touchpoints are just as prevalent offline as they are online.
Customers engage with your branding away from their devices and home computers. They engage in your stores or offices; they engage at the deli counter; they engage with your customer service representatives to resolve their issues or have a question answered or benefit explained. These touchpoints, hybrid touchpoints, such as scanning QR codes, and many more are all a part of the customer journey, and every touchpoint affects the Customer Experience (CX).
To integrate these offline touchpoints and the data that correlates with them, your data architecture needs to incorporate for their touchpoints and the data that is available. If an engagement point collects data, or provides an easy way to communicate, then your data architecture should accommodate that offline data point.
Successful Customer Experiences Requires Data from All Touchpoints
Multi-solutionists are experienced customer experience (CX) stewards that build robust and strategic data architectures that support the ability to create and implement successful customer experience strategies. Without the ability to see the effects of all touchpoints, it limits the ability of any attempts of customer experience (CX) programs to be successful because of the silos the data lives in.
Only when you have an experience team that can bridge the gaps of offline and online data architecture, as well as understanding multiple engagement channels, can you enable a full 360-degree view of your customer’s journey. Unfortunately, it’s few and far between with today’s agency model of implementation of a single mar-tech tool or a digital experience project that limits customers from reaching their customer experience (CX) potential.
The novel approach to customer experience (CX) where teams of multi-solutionists look at the entire customer journey and build your CX foundation with data architecture is the most successful method to creating customer journeys that lead to successful customer experience (CX) strategies. With that in mind, that’s the approach we take at CX Studios. We’ve stepped away from the single tool, project, and process silos which have enabled us to develop teams of multi-solutionists ready to create successful customer experience (CX) strategies with affordable and realistic outcomes.
