As consumers, we’re enveloped by new technology that creates a dizzying array of multiple new digital touchpoints that go far beyond websites and phones. Everything from smart homes to streaming content means there have never been more ways to interact with our favorite brands. How able are brands to take part in the conversation though? This series looks at the customer journey execution gap that has opened up in the space between   and the reality of what brands can offer.

In this latest article in our series examining the gap and what it means for transforming businesses, we’re looking at the challenges that technological innovation brings as it disrupts customer journeys. We’re also examining the potential opportunities it affords to create better customer journeys, increased personalization, and more choice and variety.

Let’s start with the basics. The levels of customer journey complexity that organizations need to deal with are rapidly mushrooming. The explosion in new technology and its various channels, platforms and devices is combining to make it much harder to fulfil those journeys due to technological complexity. In this article we’ll look at what that means for brands that are looking to transform their business.

It’s not just the technology that’s changing rapidly either. According to a 2022 EY global business survey, the pandemic fundamentally altered consumer attitudes to digital technologies, with implications for today. Fifty-one percent of consumers said technology has positively impacted how they engage with companies since 2020.

They expect companies to keep up, too. After years of growth in digital engagement, most customers nowadays assume brands understand their needs, particularly given the levels of data and personalized insights that they give away in every interaction. Customer engagement research by Salesforce revealed that ‘73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations’.

How the Customer Journey Has Changed

In the past, a customer journey used to be delivered almost entirely over the phone or even face-to-face. That had its challenges, but it was simple compared to a world in which consumers expect to be able to communicate easily across messaging platforms, email, apps, websites and more, switching between the two with a swipe of their finger and expecting the brand to be there, ready, on the other end.

Managing a customer through that journey is much more complex, for obvious reasons.

If your customer journey is being ceaselessly fragmented by the adoption of new platforms, devices and behaviors, take solace from the fact that it could potentially be the capabilities of new technology that help solve some of these problems.

The truth is that designing a seamless customer journey isn’t difficult – if you’re starting from scratch. Most businesses, of course, are not. Part of the expectations for transforming businesses are set by digital natives though, who are trying to navigate legacy platforms and don’t understand why the customer journey isn’t the smooth, frictionless journey they get from a brand new digital-only upstart.

The reason most organizations need to transform their journeys is that everything that previously were reasons to believe – their established pedigree and background – have begun to exert a gravitational drag on their business from which they need to escape.

These older, established organizations have legacy systems, processes and silos, all of which create friction that needs to be unpicked. Taking apart legacy processes and systems developed over, in some cases, decades, can be a really complex project. Different groups of people, systems, tech platforms, all need to be understood, reconciled and remodeled.

The variety of tasks that customers expect to be able to perform is also an issue. The challenge is to design customer journeys that can handle the bespoke complexities of messy, real life. Take banking as an example. Years ago, all the institutional memory and expertise could be found face-to-face in local branches. Customers could walk in with any problem and expect it to be resolved, for the most part, by the staff in their local branch. Or, in extreme cases, have it escalated to head office, where it would be resolved.

But when back offices and contact centers became the new hubs of expertise, skills were relocated out of the branches, processes were standardized and the tricky, complicated, real-life stuff became much harder to handle. Sometimes the result was employees working to standard processes, with less experience, on systems that didn’t support a wide variety of issues.

As those banks have digitalized, the focus has still been on digital solutions that specialize in simple A-to-B tasks that work well for customers with fairly simple requirements. Where we are now is trying to use powerful new technologies to create customer experiences and journeys that mirror the fiddly complexities of most customer service.

In wanting to deal with real customers with real problems, we’re seeing solutions like generative AI come to the fore. The potential that these groundbreaking technology platforms can help to answer any query, might even get us back to that original, simpler pre-technology era that often delivered better outcomes for customers. That said, there’s no going back…

Once the Choice Has Been Given, It Can’t Be Taken Away

There’s a myth often touted that, were brands simply to ask customers what they wanted, consumers would vote overwhelmingly to turn the clock back and opt for voice as a preference.

At Gobeyond Partners that shows this simply isn’t the case. We found, for example, that the majority of users we spoke to would opt for chat as their preferred option, rather than voice.

Consumers now live in a world where the pandora’s box of multiple channels has been opened. Once that level of choice has been sampled, it’s a brave brand that tries to take it away again. Organizations that return to a single-channel offering, trying to put the genie back in the bottle, often don’t fare all that well.

Whereas the more you can use the potential of new tech to build capability into smart self-service apps and portals, the more flexible it becomes in being able to satisfy customer needs. Chatbots are a good example of new technology’s potential. The first generation of menu-driven first generation chatbots rarely had the right answer. Clunky and arguably over-hyped, the CX they offered was often disappointing.

Next-generation chatbots powered by innovations like generative AI could tell a different story. They offer the exciting opportunity to harness natural language processing capability and create a capable customer-facing CX front end.

These new chatbots potentially would be able to interact, without script-driven prompts, to answer a huge variety of questions and find bespoke fixes for customer problems. It’s another great example of how, when you step back to analyze customer journeys, you realize that while technology has the potential to be a hindrance, it also might just be the solution.