So, how do brands keep up? The answer lies in understanding not just who your customers are but how they experience your brand at every turn. This is where customer journey mapping becomes your secret weapon.

But here’s the thing: journey mapping has an image problem. According to Gartner, 83 percent of CX professionals say their organizations struggle to turn journey maps into meaningful improvements. Why? Because too many companies treat them as pretty visuals, not strategic tools.

In our latest magazine article from January’s issue of CX Insight magazine, we dig into why customer journey mapping isn’t just about identifying pain points — it’s about uncovering growth opportunities. We break down how leading brands are using journey maps to:

• Identify moments of truth that make or break customer loyalty.
• Optimize technology investments (yes, even that sleek new AI chatbot).
• Turn data into actionable insights that drive tangible business outcomes.

Moments of Truth: Where Loyalty is Won (or Lost)

Not every customer interaction carries equal weight. Some moments — like a seamless checkout, an empathetic support call, or an unexpected thank-you email — stick with customers long after the transaction ends. These are your moments of truth.

But here’s the catch: you can’t improve what you don’t see. Without journey mapping, these pivotal moments can slip through the cracks, leaving customers feeling unseen and unvalued.

Beyond the Buzzwords: Making Journey Maps Actionable

Journey mapping isn’t about creating a static chart to hang in the break room. It’s about:

1. Seeing the Full Picture: Connecting every touchpoint, from digital ads to customer support.
2. Breaking Down Silos: Aligning marketing, sales, and service teams around the customer’s experience — not just their KPIs.
3. Driving Real Change: Using insights to design experiences that surprise, delight, and retain customers.

We’ll also share how to:

• Identify your brand’s unique moments of truth
• Leverage AI to enhance (not replace) human insights
• Keep your journey maps alive and actionable across teams

Read the full article and discover how customer journey mapping can transform not just your customer experience but your entire business.

The post Customer Journey Mapping: Identifying Your Moments of Truth appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Click here to catch up on Part 1 – Customer Expectations. 

The second installment of this series focuses on thoughts on channel choice and omnichannel digital transformation.

• The continued shift to “social channels” and the need to be adept at serving customers who reach out for help in social media.
• A key word is “predictive service”. Next era CX – what AI will enable?
• C-Suite will begin to see the potential for revenue generation on the service side of the house with new channels and old channel improvement.
• Companies must be more agile in testing and deploying new solutions and channels due to increasing competition from new market forces (e.g. Amazon).
• Businesses who do not embrace omni-channel digital transformation will lose customer loyalty, their share of wallet and overall market share, to those that do.
• The volume of calls will continue to grow even with the continued introduction of alternative channels of support.
• Amazon will disrupt the ACD market.
• IoT pervasiveness will increase call volume.
• Phone channel continues to be the dominant channel for “complex” client care issues.
• Many companies focusing on “demand management” initiatives to help clients self-serve, improve CSAT and reduce call volume.
• Mobile Messaging/SMS and MMS. More interesting and efficient use cases for text will emerge. Companies realizing that leveraging instant photos or videos sent can help reduce conversation time.
• Companies look for more true omnichannel platforms and adoption for these grow. Not just a single platform that can hook into all kinds of other technologies, but a single platform that can tie all of the conversations together, no matter what channel.
• Phone channel continues to be dominant for overall customer resolution.
• Companies will continue to add more channels and favor “cheaper” asynchronous (can respond at the same time) channels, like chat and text, in exchange for “more expensive ones”, like phone and email. Volumes of total communication will stay the same, but allow for brands to save money.
• Two way SMS continues to lag with some brands testing specific use cases.

Stay tuned next week for Part 3 – Operations.

The post 2018 Predictions for the Service Leader: Part 2 – Channels appeared first on Execs In The Know.

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The following is a guest blog by Vijai Shankar – Senior Director of Industry Marketing at [24]7.ai.

Digital transformation. It’s disrupting every industry and impacting how you deliver a great customer experience. Companies that ignore it risk their very survival; but those that embrace it can dramatically improve customer satisfaction and drive greater value – without driving additional costs.

In the world of customer service and support, there is significant change happening from both a technology and consumer standpoint. Customers are more sophisticated and have increasingly higher expectations of experience from the companies or brands they interact with, while new and innovative technologies are enabling companies to transform how they provide support. From artificial intelligence-based chatbots to messaging applications, it is very important to clearly understand how different technologies can be used to transform the customer experience (CX).

Businesses in all sectors are beginning to realize the importance of digital transformation and are raising the bar for each other. At the recent Customer Response Summit in Chicago, organized by Execs In The Know, I observed and interacted with executives from brands and we all agreed on one thing: customer experience is the forefront of digital transformation, and as each brand improves their service and experience they set the bar for the rest, even across industries. The growth of mobile has put today’s customers in the “Experience Era” and businesses need to support customers across multiple, interconnected devices and channels, with the optimal customer experience. Natural language processing, artificial intelligence and machine learning are the foundation of digital transformation and exponentially drive the potential and value of virtual agents or chatbots now and into the future.

However, digital transformation isn’t a single fix to improving the customer experience today, and the transformation will need to happen with a practical, iterative approach. It starts first with businesses defining what truly is digital transformation and its fit in customer experience. Businesses also need to know how to separate facts from fiction and learn from the best practices and proven strategies, from previous successful transformations.

Sound impossible? Not at all. Lend us your ear for 60 minutes on Nov 14th, 2017 and you will learn all about digital transformation and its impact on customer experience. Register for a free webinar sponsored by [24]7.ai and hosted by Execs In The Know, and learn:

• Why digital transformation needs to be a focus in customer service.
• What digital technologies are being used by top companies to maximize customer satisfaction and drive revenues.
• How to take an innovative approach to transforming the customer experience.

Register now: http://www2.execsintheknow.com/digitaltransformationwebinar 

The post How to Transform Your Digital Customer Experience appeared first on Execs In The Know.

The following is a guest blog from Aileen Allkins, Corporate Vice President – Customer Service & Support at Microsoft. To view the original post, click here. 

Last week I had the privilege of giving the opening keynote at the Customer Response Summit in Chicago. It was a great opportunity to connect, engage, and learn from other customer service leaders across many industries to hear what they’re doing to create delighted and loyal customers. In addition, I was able to share some insights into our digital transformation in Customer Service and Support at Microsoft and I’ve shared some highlights of my presentation below.

Our customers range from individual consumers to the biggest enterprises in the world. We support developers, gamers, government agencies, CTOs, small business owners, parents, grandparents, and everyone in between. Essentially, we support the world. Each year we have nearly 70 million assisted support interactions and over a billion unassisted support interactions across multiple channels including phone, chat, email, communities, and social. We have thousands of engineers and advocates across Microsoft employees and delivery partners, who provide deep technical support as well as non-technical support and customer service across more support and service scenarios than we can quantify.

When I started at Microsoft and took on the challenge to digitally transform the Customer Service & Support organisation, I quickly realised that with such a broad scope of customers and technologies, there was no single program, tool or technology that we could implement across the organisation that would magically make us “digital” and that the transformation needed to be broken down into smaller chunks.

At Microsoft, we took a step back to have a worldview on the impact of digital disruption. We are looking at how the intelligent cloud and mobile are changing how customers want to interact with companies. We are looking at ways to support customers who are using multiple, interconnected devices and how to help them with problems that potentially span multiple brands. We are also considering how customers are much more dependent upon us in a server-less world to ensure their business continuity as well as how we can help them achieve more with our technologies.

Regardless of the changes in technology available to us, and regardless of the world digitally transforming, when it comes to customer support some things remain the same. First and foremost, we would all prefer than customers never experienced problems and so had less need to contact Customer Support. Understandably, customers would prefer to avoid problems altogether and when they do have them, most would prefer to self-solve as the first step and want us to make it easy for them to do that.

We initially focused the first phases of our digital transformation on ‘Shifting Left’. Commonly known in the service and support industry, Shift Left strategies focus on moving issue resolution as close to the customer as possible, and we are doing that through resolving issues before they happen and providing improved solutions to self-solve. AI and machine learning provide the foundation for our Shift Left strategy and I truly believe the potential for what we can achieve is only limited by our imagination. Virtual agents are not new, but the machine learning and natural language technology behind them is significantly improving the value we can offer customers during self-solve scenarios.

The customer experience is at the forefront of our digital transformation and we want to provide customers with support how and when they want it. If, during their interaction with our virtual agent, a customer decides they would prefer to connect with a live agent, they can seamlessly switch at any time. Our virtual agent then takes on a supporting role to the live agent, providing all of the details the customer has already shared about their problem and offering additional solutions. The agent can then rank the quality of the recommendations and/or add their own, thereby continuing to teach our virtual agent and making it more valuable for the next customer.

We are progressing well on our digital transformation journey. Customer support scenarios, one by one, are being streamlined or automated with AI and machine learning being applied. What is most exciting to see is that with the time we save, we are able to add value to some of our customer interactions by conducting what we call ‘Achieve More’ conversations, helping customers get additional value from their Microsoft products and services. In our pilots, we see a significant increase in customer satisfaction on cases where we have this additional conversation and in many cases we also see increased consumption of our products and services.

Our digital transformation is a journey towards creating a world class support experience that delights customers and creates fans. By Shifting Left to reduce volume, we are able to focus on the more complicated support scenarios, providing our customers with more value and helping them achieve more with our products and technologies. Whilst our journey may take different paths and we will have lots of learnings along the way, one constant will remain the same – our customers will always be at the centre.

The post Creating Delighted and Loyal Customers Through our Digital Transformation appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Thursday, March 19th at 12:00 PM CDT. 

Experiences are connected.
Conversations are continuous.
Context must be persistent.

In a world where 90% of interactions cross devices during a single journey, and 81% use three channels to engage with customer service, how do we ensure our customers are experiencing a seamless transaction? In this session, we will explore how to identify and mend broken customer journeys, often caused by automation, escalation, and channel crossing.

Duke Energy, the largest electric power holding company in the United States, supplying and delivering energy to approximately 7.2 million U.S. customers, will give insight into their strategic vision for digital customer engagement. You will learn how partnering with customer engagement software and services provider, [24]7 Inc., allowed them to optimize their customer journey, improve customer loyalty, increase customer satisfaction, and gain a competitive advantage.

Don’t miss the engaging discussion and best practices shared on the following topics:
– Next generation customer journeys
– Digital engagement solution technologies
– Virtual agents
– Intelligent chat
– Visual IVR
– Customer Effort
– Tracking Metrics & Analytics
– Deployment Models

Join speakers Chad McDaniel from Execs In The Know, Daniel Hong from [24]7 Inc., and Yogena Austin from Duke Energy for this live webinar.

Register today!

The post NEW WEBINAR: If it’s Broken, fix it. Mending Broken Customer Journeys Through Digital Transformation appeared first on Execs In The Know.