I recently read that to manage customer journeys, those journeys must be defined and accessible. Doesn’t this sound simple and awesome? The problem is that it does not reflect the reality in which most large organizations operate.
Journey management and journey analytics remind me of the chicken and the egg – which comes first? There are journeys you inherently need to manage – onboarding, upgrades, and complaint resolution, for example – and analytics are necessary to monitor and improve those. But there are also important customer journeys and paths that you only discover through analytics and exploration. Are transitions between specific support channels proving to be critical, for example? Or do I just ignore this question if the journey was not previously defined for me?
Hopefully these few examples demonstrate that journey management and analytics must go hand-in-hand. One of the biggest challenges to-date of enabling this has been getting your data into one place. In some cases, portions of data from a single channel might live in multiple stores. In other cases, data from a single channel may live in isolation in a single repository. And in some cases, bits and pieces of data from multiple channels are transformed or duplicated across multiple stores to the point where their lineage is almost impossible to ascertain.
Thankfully, Teradata has recognized this challenge as an opportunity for innovation.
With recent announcements around the Teradata Analytics Platform and Teradata Everywhere, companies have access to a multitude of analytics tools that can be deployed and used to analyze data in a variety of data stores, on-premises or in the most popular enterprise clouds.
Ultimately, organizations still must agree on which journeys they should actively manage. But the hurdle of getting data into a single repository is no longer there. And while enterprises can now manage and analyze critical journeys by dissecting data from a variety of channels and stores, they have the freedom and flexibility to explore new scenarios and new channels. As most journey pros will tell you, the job of managing customer journeys is continuous. There are always new interactions to investigate and new channels through which to operate.
While the job is never done, at least some critical limitations are being lifted. With Teradata, you can manage the journeys you understand, while continuing to evolve those journeys and define new journeys at the same time.
Are you interested in exploring your customer journeys – defined or not? If so, check out our Path Analysis Guided Analytics Interface, which runs on Teradata, Aster, and the Teradata Analytics Platform.
Ryan Garrett is senior business development manager for Teradata Field Applications. His goal is to help organizations derive value from data by making advanced analytics more accessible, repeatable and consumable. He has a decade of experience in big data at companies large and small, an MBA from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Kentucky.
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