Share this
6 steps to save marketing costs by automating customer journeys
by Jan Hendrik Fleury on Jun 16, 2020 12:27:08 PM
The recent decrease in sales revenue for most companies is putting CMO’s under pressure to reduce costs. An interesting opportunity is to reduce manual labour by automating hundreds of customer journeys. In this article, we present a step-by-step approach to automate, at scale.
Now is the time to level up and automate at scale – improving not only ROI on sales and marketing resources and technologies, but also improving customer satisfaction, by organising a more automated customer sales and service experience. In addition, automating reduces the risks of faults by manual labour significantly.
Step 1: Create a list of customer journeys
Identify a long list of moments in different customer journeys. Depending on the industry, you should have approximately 100 to 500 customer journeys. These journeys are found typically across 3-7 channels and 3-5 processes including sales, onboarding, growth, customer care, life events such as clients who are moving, service communications, returns/complaints, social media monitoring.
Step 2: Assess journeys on 3-5 criteria
For each journey identified, tag your list with the channel, data requirements, the effort required to automate, the current manual work needed and the upside potential in terms of improving customer experience or sales. This is apart from the cost efficiency and risk mitigation from reduced manual work.
Step 3: Prioritise the list and assess efforts
Based on where most manual work can be saved and where the most value can be created for the customer experience and sales results, create a prioritised task list, as well as an effort estimate as a basis for agile work, for instance in effort points.
Step 4: Set up a task force for automating ‘the shortlist of 100’ and leverage the DevOps methodology
Work in agile sprints. Only stop when the cost of the taskforce (typically 4-6 FTE) exceeds the discounted value of the automated process. Organise for hundreds, not dozens of processes being automated, and for putting automated processes into test and production within a four-week timeframe. During the transition period, the team that has automated the tasks should own not only the development, and operations but also the business results.
Step 5: Avoid the pitfalls – by measuring results
Why haven’t more organisations progressed further with automation?
- Siloed sales and marketing organisations generate siloed data that is difficult to utilise
- Lack of customer journey full ownership
- Conflicting KPIs
Silos are difficult to change over a short period. Still, you can make sure to overcome difficulties by measuring actual results as a priority. If you are in a position where you want to improve results dramatically, set up metrics for following up on progress from the beginning. Appoint a steering group with members from the financial department and report on both development progress and efficiency results on a bi-weekly basis (typical sprint period).
Step 6: Smart use of your tools
Make automation of customer processes easier by using automation capabilities such as Machine Learning frameworks, proper documentation practices and data models that support activation into different owned and paid channels. Without having the basics right, you will not be able to succeed. Switching out your existing martech tools might improve the situation only partially. From our experience in most cost cases, the integration and measurement will bring you the short term reduction of the cost you need.
ABOUT CRYSTALLOIDS
Crystalloids helps companies improve their customer experiences and build marketing technology. Founded in 2006 in the Netherlands, Crystalloids builds crystal-clear solutions that turn customer data into information and knowledge into wisdom. As a leading Google Cloud Partner, Crystalloids combines experience in software development, data science, and marketing, making them one of a kind IT company. Using the Agile approach Crystalloids ensures that use cases show immediate value to their clients and frees their time to focus on decision making and less on programming.
Share this
- September 2024 (1)
- August 2024 (1)
- July 2024 (4)
- June 2024 (2)
- May 2024 (1)
- April 2024 (4)
- March 2024 (2)
- February 2024 (2)
- January 2024 (4)
- December 2023 (1)
- November 2023 (4)
- October 2023 (4)
- September 2023 (4)
- June 2023 (2)
- May 2023 (2)
- April 2023 (1)
- March 2023 (1)
- January 2023 (4)
- December 2022 (3)
- November 2022 (5)
- October 2022 (3)
- July 2022 (1)
- May 2022 (2)
- April 2022 (2)
- March 2022 (5)
- February 2022 (3)
- January 2022 (5)
- December 2021 (5)
- November 2021 (4)
- October 2021 (2)
- September 2021 (2)
- August 2021 (3)
- July 2021 (4)
- May 2021 (2)
- April 2021 (2)
- March 2021 (1)
- February 2021 (2)
- January 2021 (1)
- December 2020 (1)
- October 2020 (2)
- September 2020 (1)
- August 2020 (2)
- July 2020 (2)
- June 2020 (1)
- March 2020 (2)
- February 2020 (1)
- January 2020 (1)
- December 2019 (1)
- November 2019 (3)
- October 2019 (2)
- September 2019 (3)
- August 2019 (2)
- July 2019 (3)
- June 2019 (5)
- May 2019 (2)
- April 2019 (4)
- March 2019 (2)
- February 2019 (2)
- January 2019 (4)
- December 2018 (2)
- November 2018 (2)
- October 2018 (1)
- September 2018 (2)
- August 2018 (3)
- July 2018 (3)
- May 2018 (2)
- April 2018 (5)
- March 2018 (5)
- February 2018 (2)
- January 2018 (4)
- November 2017 (2)
- October 2017 (2)