The Power of Customer Engagement: Achieving Full Automation for Relevant Experiences

In today's competitive marketplace, delivering dynamic, cross-channel experiences to customers wherever and whenever they need is no longer a luxury—it's a necessity. Customer lifecycle marketing offers a strategic approach to enhancing the customer experience by recognizing that marketing communications resonate differently at various stages of the journey. 

To orchestrate meaningful conversations and foster deeper connections that truly matter, it's crucial to understand and address the various stages customers go through, providing maximum value at each touchpoint.

The Paradox of Marketing Automation

Despite the growing adoption of marketing automation, with 76% of companies utilizing some form of automation (according to HubSpot), only 10% of customer journeys are fully automated (according to ‘The State of Marketing Automation’ from Ascend2). This discrepancy is particularly puzzling considering that 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions from companies, and 76% of them feel frustrated when this expectation is not met (according to McKinsey & Company).

From the customer’s perspective, engaging in interactive and cohesive conversations, and receiving timely and emotionally resonant messages, stimulates a sense of being understood and appreciated in a responsive manner. So when brands deliver genuine value, customers become more engaged, leading to deeper connections and increased brand loyalty. Consequently, this enhances customer lifetime value and drives sustainable growth.

Fragmented vs. Total Automation in CRM

In the fast-paced world of customer engagement, cross-channel automated orchestration has become a crucial component for businesses aiming to enhance efficiency, improve customer experience, and drive growth. However, when it comes to automation in cross-channel marketing, there are two primary approaches: Fragmented Automation and Total Automation.

Fragmented Automation refers to automating a limited number of processes. It’s a natural stage for brands just starting their customer engagement strategy, however, operating in a fragmented manner can also be due to:

• Siloed data - the data needed sits within other systems 
• Lack of technical expertise within the team
• Incomplete integration with the overall technology stack - you might have the right tools but they’re not all connected 
• Untapped AI platform functionalities 
• A lack of focus on customer retention within the organization

Brands at this stage leverage automation to enhance campaign personalization and control e.g. set-up triggers, journeys, and enhance campaign timings. By doing this, they also benefit from freeing up resources within the team so they can be allocated elsewhere. 

But the downside of a fragmented approach creates:

• Complexity and inefficiencies - because automation isn’t applied optimally and because systems aren’t connected, there is still a need for manual intervention and ‘filling gaps’ within the lifecycle.
• Fragmented view - again, there is a need for a manual approach to fetch data to either feed or analyze CRM activity. This often results in less data-led strategic decisions. 

Total Automation in customer engagement is a comprehensive approach that leverages advanced technology and integrations to automate all aspects of the customer lifecycle. The aim is to:

• Execute tasks in real time and at scale 
• Build comprehensive user profiles 
• Build stronger customer relationships with first-party data 
• Simplify cross-channel orchestration while delivering content that converts
• Increase productivity and inspire collaboration on strategic planning and higher value tasks 
• Gain deeper engagement insights to fuel strategic decisions

Roadmap to achieve a full cross-channel automated orchestration 

Achieving a fully automated orchestration involves a strategic combination of data, platforms, and most importantly, fostering meaningful relationships between brands and customers across all touchpoints in the marketing funnel journey. 

Several challenges emerge in this context, including siloed data, under-utilized platforms due to a lack of technical expertise or incomplete integration with the overall technology stack, untapped AI platform functionalities, and insufficient focus on customer retention.

At Jellyfish, we offer a strategic consultancy flexible solution that addresses these challenges by providing a customized customer engagement strategy and a clear activation plan. This comprises of three main phases:

1. Collaborative Working Sessions

The first phase involves collaborative working sessions with the brand's main stakeholders to align on long and short-term objectives. Here we identify tangible use cases, current customer engagement activities, and assess the data available to pinpoint room for improvement.

2. Strategic Omni-Channel Orchestration 

The second phase focuses on maximizing the value of customer data available and determining relevant automated personalized experiences to address key points of the customer lifecycle. Each of these programs are defined to: 

• Reach the right audience 
• Deliver compelling conversations on every channel 
• Meet customers where they are 
• Deliver timely conversations

As part of this phase, depending on the platform used, we will develop an activation plan that highlights how to work smarter and leverage the available AI features across the newly proposed customer experiences. 

AI features can help to craft brilliant experiences, recommend the right items for every customer, automate routine tasks to achieve better results, and work smarter. 

3. Content and Data Briefs Production

Finally, we will produce content and data briefs to build customer experiences in the client’s platform, ensuring a seamless and smooth implementation and activation. 

The support we offer is very flexible and modular: we can focus on all three phases, only on some and/or on the implementation step of the customer journey and related campaigns within the platform used.

Conclusion

Customer lifecycle marketing is an essential strategic approach to customer acquisition and engagement. Acknowledging the need for different conversations at different stages of a customer’s journey and offering a truly consistent and responsive experience is the new normal, and therefore brands need to make customer engagement a business priority. 

Reaching the ‘holy grail’ of Total Automation isn’t unachievable, but it’s certainly something that takes time to build up to - it requires dedication and investment. The payoff, however, sees brands unlocking new levels of efficiency, improving customer experience, driving sustainable growth, and ultimately, maximizing the lifetime value of their customers.