Dreamforce Is Over. What’s Next For The Customer Journey?

Following Dreamforce and a series of LiveOps Sales Kick-off meetings, it’s safe to say, I’ve had a busy past few weeks. Both events have left me with a sense of excitement about what’s to come not only for LiveOps but also for the industry. Why? Because there is an even stronger synergy between the two now that Dreamforce is over.

Buzz about Dreamforce focused on the absolute necessity to wrangle Big Data into actionable insights, as well as creating personalized 1:1 customer journeys. This stemmed from two salesforce.com launches – the September release of Journey Builder for Apps, which empowers brands to deliver personalized customer journeys directly from mobile apps, and their new solution Wave, which focuses on “analytics for the rest of us,” making customer data available to all within an organization in order to further improve customer journeys. If these announcements, coming from such a big player, don’t underscore the need to leverage customer data, I don’t know what does. These have been critical areas of focus for LiveOps since we launched our contextual routing solution LiveOps CxEngage earlier this year, so it was validating to see a large brand, and LiveOps partner, get in the game. That’s all well and good, you might say, but with the Dreamforce party now over, what needs to happen next?

I’m giving all brands a call to action. Embrace the customer journey and harness the power of data now or risk losing customers to the competition next year.

Tony Robbins said it best at Dreamforce when he stated: “We’re drowning in information but starving for wisdom.” Truer words have never been spoken in the customer service industry. Every time a customer reaches out to a brand, no matter the channel, they provide them with information about their brand experience. These interactions form sequences of events that tie together to create a customer journey. Oftentimes, for many customers, it feels like every interaction with a brand requires a jump-start to their customer journey or, even worse, the start of a new customer journey. Why do customers experience fragmented interactions with brands? Because brands are not outfitted with the tools needed to leverage all historical and real-time data and create a seamless customer journey. Customers get frustrated. Agents get frustrated. Brands miss out. There are no excuses now for not harnessing customer data to mend the customer journey because all of the tools are present to make it happen. What is needed is buy-in and the passion to see it through.

While we’ve been stressing the importance of enabling seamless, personalized customer journeys and contextual routing since January, the industry is quickly catching up. The question is, are brands? Whether you choose salesforce.com or LiveOps solutions, you will be taking a powerful step toward the bleeding edge of customer service. Join us there. Leave the competition behind.

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.