The Path to Personalized Customer Journeys

at the time, according to Manning. Today, JetBlue continues to "anticipate the needs of its customer base as a whole, and nail the individual experience as well," he says.

Balance Privacy with Efficiency

Analysts have named 2014 The Year of the Data Breach, so in 2015, customers are going to be particularly wary about sharing their personal information. To get customers to share their data, there has to be a balanced exchange of value, Wang says. "Customers are giving up privacy in exchange for convenience, so the experience has to be worth it," he explains.

At the same time, however, too many privacy measures or other barriers can cause friction and hurt the overall experience. "There are a lot of things that make the experience too complex. Having to log in several times, dealing with several layers of verification, being required to re-enter payment information...these are all things that add friction, and if you can minimize it, you can move personalization to a whole new level," Wang says.

The Girl Scouts of the USA was confronted with this problem in its volunteer recruitment and onboarding efforts, and turned to Salesforce.com's Salesforce1 Mobile App and Sales Cloud—both now part of the Salesforce Customer Success Platform—to streamline the sign-up process.

In the past, becoming a volunteer required filling out forms on different Web sites and submitting paper forms separately. The process took weeks, and volunteers often gave up before completing it. But since the Girl Scouts' Minnesota Wisconsin River Valleys Council began using the Salesforce 1 Mobile App to sign volunteers up on the spot and the Sales Cloud to consolidate disjointed forms into one coherent structure, the entire application, verification, and assignment process has been reduced to just a few hours.

"Before, we just made it too darn hard to become a volunteer," Maggie Miller, chief information officer at the Girl Scouts of the USA, said during a preshow interview at the Salesforce1 Tour in New York City. Since implementing Salesforce's solution, the organization has been able to start shrinking its list of roughly 30,000 to 40,000 girls waiting to be paired up with volunteer troop leaders. At the Minnesota Wisconsin River Valleys Council, there was a 28 percent increase in the number of new girls served within a few weeks of adoption, Miller said.

Though not every company has a sign-up process that requires a background check or other complex registration processes, there's a lesson to be learned here: If the experience is too complicated, customers will abandon it, and brands are responsible for simplifying it and speeding it up. When it comes to something as basic as check-out, remembering a customer's preferred address or credit card is an easy way to streamline the process, and can mean a world of difference to customers who dread filling out order forms.

"Customers are constantly on the go, they're multitasking, they're busy. The last thing they want to do is waste time by filling out endless forms over and over. Realizing that and remembering key information so that it can be prefilled or skipped lets customers know that their time is valuable, and that all the information they've already shared is adding value to their experience," Wang says.

Be Flexible and Forward-Thinking

One of the biggest misconceptions about customer journeys is that they are linear, but customers actually discover and interact with brands in a multitude of ways. While one person may start his journey in a brick-and-mortar store, another may start her journey online. Still, the interactions are highly connected and contextualized regardless of the order in which they occur.

"Customer experience is more of a 'choose-your-own-adventure book' than it is a journey," Wang says. "It's just one of those things where you have to apply some design thinking. Businesses have to plan for different types of journeys, but the more they go digital, the easier it will become for them to capture context," he adds.

The next three to five years will be crucial for brands, as Wang expects a growing number of vendors to roll out new solutions aimed at customizing the entire customer journey or improve existing solutions with more personalization functionality. As tools become increasingly sophisticated, however, companies will have to avoid a major potential pitfall—relying on technology to do what only people can do.

"Personalization is all about understanding the customer and anticipating needs. Technology can give you data and insight and can help execute a vision, but it can't know your customer for you," Manning says, "and it'll always be up to the businesses themselves to understand their customers and design the next great experience for them."

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Associate Editor Maria Minsker can be reached at mminsker@infotoday.com.

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