Does anyone recognize the image above? This is the Tibet Road on the border of Tibet and China, one of the most treacherous roads in the world. It represents the traditional customer journey map brands try to create with their customers. Long and winding, it’s a grind to make it to the summit — and not everyone does. One misstep along the way, and you are off the cliff.
The same goes for customers. One misstep by a brand and you lose the customer. We spend all of our time and effort as brands to get customers to the top of the mountain, acting as a sherpa to guide them to the summit. We provide them with offers, with promotions, with VIP treatment, and timely and contextual experiences. Once you get the customer to the top of the mountain with your brand, it’s very easy to lose them.
We must then think about retaining them as a loyal brand advocate. We need to ensure they can share the stories of the brand with their friends and families and help extend reach. We need to ensure there is value for them and the solutions we provide help remove the friction from the customer experience.
Older journey mapping solutions are failing modern marketers
Sounds exhausting right? There needs to be a better way. Traditional customer journey management capabilities from vendors have focused on helping marketers design a manual, outbound pathway to drive conversions. Being able to create any sequence of events from scratch can end up with a “spaghetti diagram” that is impossible to untangle or manage, nonetheless execute and measure.
Journey orchestration solutions from older, more monolithic marketing clouds are often disconnected from the core ability to execute and operationalize marketing programs. Journey mapping and whiteboarding has become a creative best practice, but how can brands scale this process and react to changing consumer needs? How can brands determine if a consumer has already been through a journey? What happens with customer fatigue or channel conflict? What if things change in the customer lifecycle? What if they make a purchase or change their path? Marketers need to find ways to become more agile and reactive in their approaches to managing and delivering on the customer experience.
Understanding the customer journey: Cheetah Journey Designer
Cheetah defines Journeys as: “A series of orchestrated touchpoints between a brand and a consumer. Journeys can be simple in nature (triggered), advanced (standard library), or fully customized.” Journeys personalize all interactions across channels, unifying personalization rules and logic, synchronizing all channels to work together, sequencing customer interactions through time.
We are very proud to announce the next generation of customer journeys that are created and standardized to meet the needs of the modern marketer and deliver on the dynamic and real-time needs of today’s consumer. Instead of managing complex journeys that require manual setup, configuration, and heavy services work, we have envisioned a world where marketers can choose from a growing library of standard journeys.
Journeys that can be applied across industries, across use cases, and can be modified to fit the nuances and needs of each brand’s and organization’s business objectives. Cheetah Journey Designer ships with a library of standard journeys, including:
- Onboarding- Welcome customers with an introductory offer and next steps
- Abandoned cart – Reminder triggered journey based on cart and website activity
- Winback- Turn a previously engaged and loyal client back to the brand
- Post Purchase- Notifications, conditional steps, optimized decisions
- Anniversary- Date based sequenced program
- Progressive profiling- Collection of zero and first party data for better engagement
Library of standard journeys
Marketer-managed journey orchestration (UI coming this summer)
Cheetah’s unique value prop is we have the most comprehensive set of journey options in the market. We support marketers with simple journeys — which are single-step, instantly triggered actions, and advanced journeys. These are multi-stage, long-running journeys that will continue to be bolstered by the growing library of templates, and fully custom journeys that marketers can create or Marigold Engage+ can help create.
We will continue to grow the library of standard journeys later this year, and the triggered and custom options are available now, with more enhancements by the end of the year.
