Optimize customer journeys proactively
Genesys Cloud offers an extended set of capabilities that you can use to gain insights into your customer journeys. These tools help you with the following:
- Allows you to gain a comprehensive, multichannel view of your customer journeys.
- Enables you to track, analyze, and optimize every step of the customer experience.
- Provides dynamic visualizations and heat maps that reveal customer engagement levels across Architect flow components.
- Allows for immediate insights into high-traffic areas and interactions.
With both granular and high-level views, you can use Flow Insights, Journey Flows and Replay Mode to dive into specific Architect flow components and perform the following:
- Measure flow performance.
- Monitor key flow milestone frequencies.
- Understand how customers progress toward desired flow outcomes.
- Visualize pathways customers take, capturing both successful and challenging routes.
Use Journey Management to extend your view beyond single-channel Architect flows with 365 days of cross-channel data and do the following:
- Perform trend and funnel analysis.
- Track journey performance over time.
- Quickly identify shifts in your journey metrics.
- Identify friction points in multichannel transitions.
- Refine customer experiences.
- Improve customer satisfaction across touchpoints.
Gain powerful insights into your customer journeys with Flow Insights:
Key benefits at a glance
Get a clear view of how customers progress through your flow directly within Architect.
With a heat map representation, you can quickly identify areas with high customer engagement, as darker colors indicate denser interactions.
Hover over the highlighted Architect actions or flow components to display the exact number of times customers interacted with each of these actions or components.
Key use cases in detail
Analyze the heat map and note where the darkest interaction colors appear to pinpoint the most frequently used Architect actions and other flow components within the flow. If certain actions or components are heavily interacted with, simplify or refine these components to ensure a smoother experience, and reduce any potential friction at key points of customer interaction. High interaction counts can also indicate that customers need extra guidance or support. Add clearer instructions to address customer needs proactively.
Use the heat map to spot areas with unexpectedly high interaction counts, which could indicate bottlenecks where customers struggle or require multiple attempts. For instance, if an Architect action or menu has significantly higher interaction counts than surrounding actions, it could suggest confusion or difficulty completing that step. Investigate ways to simplify or clarify this Architect action to improve flow efficiency.
Identify flow components with low interaction counts to assess whether customers overlook these components or the components are ineffective in guiding customers. Make these components more prominent or evaluate whether they are necessary to refine the journey and ensure that each step contributes value and supports customer progression.
With the ability to see exact interaction counts on hover, you can prioritize optimizations on specific flow components that receive the highest customer engagement. For example, if an initial step shows a high interaction count but subsequent steps drop off, you can refine this first step to ensure it better prepares customers for the next stages. You also help customers to maintain engagement throughout the flow.
The heat map data allows you to discern trends in customer movement. If customers repeatedly engage with specific Architect flow components in certain ways (for example, they repeatedly return to a particular step), redesign this part of the flow and add more guidance to support a smoother journey.
Track how interaction frequencies change over time to measure the impact of optimizations. If a particular action’s interaction count drops significantly after refinement, it can indicate that the improvement successfully removed a barrier, guiding customers more effectively through the flow.
Actionable insight
- From the Architect home page, click or hover over the Flows menu and select the desired flow type.
- Click the flow that you want to analyze.
- Use the Flow Insights toggle to display the interaction heat map for the flow. Note: There must be interaction data from the past seven days for the heat map to appear.
- Look for flow components with high frequency (interaction count) levels and check if customers are dropping off in subsequent steps. In the following example, customers make it to the Digital Menu action in a digital bot flow, but fail to progress further:
- Now, examine the Digital Menu action to review and determine why progress is stalling and identify any necessary actions to remove the fricton points.
Gain powerful insights into your customer journeys with Journey Flows:
Key benefits at a glance
Get a dynamic visual representation of how users navigate through and engage with various flow segments in their customer journey.
Explore granular and high-level insights into customer behavior by drilling down into steps that customers take throughout their journey or zooming out to view broader patterns. Reveal key pathways within an Architect flow that represents a segment of the customer’s experience.
Select from various flow outcomes to generate distinct visualizations to reveal the paths customers took to reach each outcome. Outcomes include scenarios such as path abandonment, escalation to an agent, disconnection, or intent recognition failure. These paths illustrate both successful or happy routes and failure routes within the customer journey, and provide insights into a range of customer experiences.
View all flow milestones that customers reach on each journey path. Hover over specific milestones or outcomes to see the frequency counts of customer interactions. Get quick access to data on how often customers interact with particular steps to help you assess flow performance and customer engagement along the journey.
Key use cases in detail
Analyze visualizations of customer paths that lead to the abandonment outcome to identify specific milestones where a high percentage of customers drop off. If, for example, there is a high frequency of abandonments after a specific milestone, you can investigate potential friction points, such as unclear instructions, lengthy processes, or technical issues, and make adjustments to improve customer retention through this segment of the journey.
Analyze paths that end in an escalation to an agent to determine at what stages and why customers felt the need for live assistance. With these insights, you can identify opportunities to enhance self-service options, for example, by adding more guidance at specific milestones, improving automated responses, or refining knowledge articles. Such adjustments can reduce escalations and ensure that more customers achieve successful outcomes without additional support.
Focus on the happy paths where customers reach successful outcomes without any issue to identify efficient pathways. Understand the milestones that are common to these paths to simplify the customer journeys by removing or consolidating some steps to make it easier for more customers to reach successful outcomes quickly and with less effort.
Review paths that end in a disconnect or recognition failure including each step that leads up to these outcomes to detect and resolve root causes, such as limitations in recognizing customer intent or confusing interface elements. Proactively address these issues to reduce the failure rate to improve customer satisfaction and completion rates.
Use the frequency metrics at each milestone to identify high-traffic areas within the flow and prioritize optimizations for these points. Focus on these key milestones to ensure that changes impact the greatest number of customers, which can contribute to smoother, faster journeys and higher satisfaction scores across the board.
Zoom out to view broader patterns of customer movement through the Architect flow to detect common journey patterns, such as sequences of milestones reached by specific customer segments. You can use such patterns to inform personalized experiences, such as tailored prompts, shortcut options, or predictive guidance that aligns with likely next steps, and create a more intuitive and engaging customer journey.
With the frequency metrics that Architect shows on hovering over milestones or outcomes, you can make informed, data-driven decisions about where to invest optimization efforts. For instance, if a particular milestone sees heavy interaction before a drop-off, you could allocate resources to improve that specific point, and drive a targeted approach to customer journey optimization.
Actionable insight
Assume that you are a contact center admin or analyst who wants to assess the effectiveness of a bot. Your goal is to compare the number of customers who achieve resolution through the bot versus a human agent (ACD). To accomplish this task, use Journey Flows functionalities.
- From the Architect home page, click or hover over the Flows menu and select the desired flow type.
- Click the flow that you want to analyze.
- Click Journey Flows in the Insights and Optimizations menu. The Journey Flows visualization opens. The visualization shows the distribution of customers along the various flow milestones and outcomes as well as the various flow exit reasons. The visualization also demonstrates how the customer journey progressed at each flow stage:
- Next, because you want to know how many customers went to the Payment Initialized milestone, hover over the milestone to display the frequency count:
- Now, to examine why 11 per cent of customers who completed the Payment Initialized milestone asked to speak to a human agent and seven per cent of customers disconnected the call, use Flow Insights to generate a heatmap of the Digital Menu options in your Initial Settings menu or use Replay Mode to check execution instances of your flow.
- Next, examine sessions that were Abandoned.
Gain powerful insights into your customer journeys with Replay Mode:
Key benefits at a glance
Replay past executions of your Architect flows to pinpoint low engagement and conversion issues based on insights from Flow Insights and Journey Flows.
Test flow logic adjustments to boost engagement with key components of your Architect flow, reduce drop-offs for key flow milestones, and increase the number of customers who reach desired flow outcomes.
Key use cases in detail
After you identify a specific flow component with low customer engagement in Flow Insights, use Replay Mode to examine how customers interact with that flow component. Replay the steps that customers take to identify potential issues, such as confusing wording, slow response times, or missing information, that could be causing customers to disengage. Make targeted adjustments to boost engagement rates with the flow component.
If Journey Flows shows a high drop-off rate at a specific flow milestone, replay interactions that lead to that flow milestone to see where customers are dropping off and why. For example, if customers are exiting after a specific menu choice or step, Replay Mode can reveal issues like unclear options or unmet expectations. Adjust the milestone to minimize drop-offs and retain customers in the journey.
After you change the Architect flow’s logic, for example, you simplify steps or clarify messaging, use Replay Mode to observe if these modifications positively impact customer behavior. Compare new execution instances with previous execution instances and then confirm whether engagement rates have also improved in Flow Insights and if Journey Flows shows fewer drop-offs and more customers reaching key outcomes.
For flow components that lead to successful outcomes, replay the customer interactions to understand better why these flow components work well. This insight can guide optimizations for other parts of the flow, and create more success paths that drive customers to desired outcomes more reliably.
After you make improvements to the Architect flow’s logic to reduce drop-offs or increase milestone completion, replay both pre- and post-adjustment interactions. Such comparison allows you to verify if the adjustments led to a more intuitive flow. Verify the increased engagement in Flow Insights and the improved milestone progression in Journey Flows.
For flows with multiple pathways (such as different menu options or self-service routes), use Replay Mode to track how customers navigate these choices. If certain paths show significantly lower engagement or higher drop-offs, pinpoint where customers encounter issues and make modifications to balance path effectiveness across the flow.
If execution instances reveal frequent escalations to agents at a particular point of an Architect flow, analyze these moments to identify gaps in the self-service flow that could be causing customer frustration. Add prompts, clarify options, or improve flow responses to create a smoother self-service experience that reduces the need for agent intervention and improves journey health.
Actionable insight
- From the Architect home page, click or hover over the Flows menu and select a flow type for which historical execution data is available.
- Open the flow that you previously executed to debug and troubleshoot.
- Click Execution History. The Flow Execution History dialog box opens.
- Under Results, Architect lists previous execution instances of the flow that you opened and provides the name, version, flow type as well as the start and end date time of the flow instances.
- Click a flow instance to open the instance in Replay Mode. For more information, see Use replay mode to troubleshoot an Architect flow.
- Use the replay controls to step through the flow to replay the sequence of actions that lead to the specific flow component that you want to analyze.
- If the required level of execution data is available, review communication exchanges and inspect variable values as well to pinpoint the issue with the flow component.
In the following digital bot flow example, customers enter their order number to check the status of their order, but the bot fails to recognize the number.
- The flow designer used an Ask for Slot action to verify the order number and used a slot of the type
builtin:anyto store the customer’s input. - After the bot receives the input, the flow moves on to a Decision action that uses the expression
If(FindFirst(Flow.OrderNumbersDatabase, ToJSON(Task.CheckNumber))==-1, false, true)to determine whether the array of existing order numbers stored in theFlow.OrderNumbersDatabasevariable contains the order number the customer entered (Task.CheckThisNumber).
Flow Insight’s heat map analysis shows that the Decision action always takes the unhappy path:
Architect’s Replay mode provides the key to understanding why this happens. The bot uses a pattern in the format ###-### to display the order number for customers, where each # represents a digit (0–9) and - is a dash separator. The grouped format is a familiar pattern for customers that reduces the likelihood of errors compared to a long string of digits, and makes it easier to read and remember the number.
The recognition issue occurs because the bot provides the order number in the###-### format, but the bot expects a string of digits without dashes as user input (see the order numbers in the Flow.OrderNumbersDatabase variable). This mismatch in the flow design leads to recognition failure.
Replay mode revealed that the bot must handle dashes in customer input. To address the recognition issue, use a regex slot type with the pattern ^\d{6}$|^\d{3}-\d{3}$ to validate the input format and remove any dashes before you check the order number against the order database.
Gain powerful insights into your customer journeys with Journey Management:
Key benefits at a glance
Get a customizable view of the entire end-to-end customer journey across all Genesys Cloud channels to help you understand customer interactions from initial contact to resolution.
Extend your analysis of customer journeys beyond single-channel Architect flows, with up to 365 days of data available to track customer interactions across multiple channels and visualize long-term engagement patterns.
View and assess specific journeys, such as customer transitions from bot interactions to agent support, across multiple channels, to understand customer needs and improve journey outcomes.
Filter for key events, such as repeat calls within the past 24 hours, or add channels like SMS to the journey canvas, enabling a tailored view of the customer experience to drive better engagement.
Visualize journey performance trends over time with charts and perform quick comparisons across time periods to identify shifts in metrics, such as self-service rates or escalations, for proactive issue resolution.
Analyze customer progression across journey stages to pinpoint high-attrition points to identify and reduce friction between channels for a smoother, more effective customer experience.
Key use cases in detail
Visualize journeys across multiple channels to track customer interactions that span different touchpoints. For example, interactions that start with web messaging and move to a call. If customers frequently switch channels mid-journey, it could indicate that certain channels are failing to meet their needs. You can then focus on enhancing the initial channel’s functionality to reduce unnecessary channel-switching, which reduces customer effort and improves satisfaction.
Examine customer journeys that start with a bot in a web messaging window and transition to an agent to identify points where customers experience gaps or delays in service. For example, if customers frequently contact an agent after struggling with the bot, you could refine the bot’s capabilities or adjust the transfer process to ensure a smoother transition.
Explore how often customers move from a self-servicing interaction to an agent across different channels, such as from a web messaging interaction to a voice call. Visualize these transfers to identify if certain interactions commonly lead to escalations, suggesting areas where the customer experience might need improvements to enable more effective self-service. You can also use this analysis to make sure you transfer customers more smoothly and with the relevant context already captured to reduce the need for customers to repeat information or agents to repeat customer calls.
You can evaluate the success rates of self-service interactions across various channels, such as digital bots across various messaging channels. By comparing the journey paths of customers who self-serviced successfully against those who required agent intervention, you can identify which self-service flows are most effective on each channel. For example, if SMS has a lower self-service completion rate than web messaging, you might suggest enhancements to the SMS flow, provide clearer prompts, or offer more resources for common issues.
Examine which channels customers use at different points in their journey to identify trends that suggest customer preferences. For example, if customers tend to start with IVR but switch to messaging for follow-up, consider proactive messaging options after IVR interactions to better align with customer behavior and preferences to improve the journey experience.
Visualize trends in journey performance over time with bar, line, or column charts. Compare metrics across time periods to identify changes in journey effectiveness, such as a drop in self-service rates or an increase in agent escalations. Monitor these trends to detect and address emerging issues proactively and ensure that the journey remains efficient and effective.
Use funnel analysis to assess customer progression through various stages of their journey across channels to identify high-attrition points. For example, if many customers engage with an IVR system but fail to progress to a messaging channel for self-service, investigate potential friction points in the transition. Improve the transition between channels to maintain engagement and support successful journey progression.
Adding multiple channels like SMS or email to the journey canvas to evaluate how these channels fit within the larger customer journey. If certain channels show low usage or effectiveness, consider ways to integrate or promote these options better to create a more comprehensive and responsive multichannel experience for customers.
Actionable insight
Assume that you are a contact center analyst who assesses the effectiveness of bots that are designed for social media applications. Your goal is to compare the number of customers who achieve resolution through bots versus human agents (ACD). To accomplish this task, use Journey Analyzer functionalities.
- Log in to your Genesys Cloud account and click the Journey Management menu. The Journey Management screen opens.
- Create a new journey.
- To enter Edit mode and modify a journey, click Edit.
- Journey events align to the types of actions that are triggered throughout an interaction. The Customer Start event is triggered when a customer engages with a channel. Drag a Customer Start event and filter it for the social channel you want to measure.
- Open the event, click the filter icon and select the following:
- MediaType -Message
- MessageType - The social channels you want to measure
- Add a descriptive name on the canvas to this event such as, Started a social engagement on Twitter.
- Next, because you want to know how many customers went to Bot Start after they started their social engagement, drag and drop Bot Start to the canvas and then let it connect to Customer Start.Tip: Use the Tab key on the keyboard to move navigate through the event list and use the menu.
- To narrow down the event to the bot name, include the bot name as an event attribute filter.Tip: You can find the bot name in Architect. Journey Management supports native or third-party bot events, but native bots provide more detailed data for the journey.
- To narrow down the event to the bot name, include the bot name as an event attribute filter.
- Now, to examine completed bot sessions, drag Bot End to the canvas and then let it connect to Bot Start.
- Because you are interested in the same bot that you examined in Step 6, include the bot's identifier as an event attribute filter at this event.Tip: If you use a native Genesys bot, then to narrow your analysis to an intent and other interaction attributes that may be relevant, add Bot Turn between start and end.
- To see completed bot sessions, include the botsessionOutcome filter and then select the complete attribute.
- Click Apply filter.
- As in this event, you examine completed bot sessions and not the sessions that went to ACD (automatic call distribution), add a BotResult filter in the Exclude section with TransfertoACD as the value.
- Click Apply filter.
- Because you are interested in the same bot that you examined in Step 6, include the bot's identifier as an event attribute filter at this event.
- Next, examine sessions that went to ACD. Drag the ACD Start event to the canvas. Let it connect to Bot Start, so that it is parallel to Bot End.
- In this event, select queueID as Attribute, and then add a filter for the Payment Queue.
- Click Save.
Calculate and edit the sample journey
- Click Calculate to generate journeys. A notification about the calculation count appears.
- To continue, click Proceed. The calculation takes a few minutes to run. The loading time depends on the volume of data to process, so larger datasets take more time to calculate. To see the results, refresh the page.
- After the calculation finishes, you want to know the number of resolved calls by agents. To edit the journey, click Edit.
- Drag the Agent Start event, and let it connect to the ACD Start event.
- Add a filter for the Payment Queue. The payment queue has two wrap-up codes: Success and Failure.
- Track agent resolution with a Success wrap-up code. From the Voice event group, drag a Wrap Up event to the canvas and let it connect with the Agent Start event. Select the wrapupCode attribute and include the identifier of the Success wrap-up code as a filter.Note: You can get the list of wrap-up code IDs used in your environment with the Wrap-up API endpoint through the API Explorer, which is available on the Genesys Cloud Developer site.
- To indicate that it stands for the Success wrap-up code, add a descriptive title to your After Call Event such as 'Successful Resolution'.
- Track agent resolution with a Success wrap-up code. From the Voice event group, drag a Wrap Up event to the canvas and let it connect with the Agent Start event. Select the wrapupCode attribute and include the identifier of the Success wrap-up code as a filter.
- Add a filter for the Payment Queue. The payment queue has two wrap-up codes: Success and Failure.
- Click Save.
- To update the journey, click Calculate. To see the updated counts refresh the page.
See funnel analysis in the sample journey
With the help of funnel analysis, you can understand how your customers move through the journey to achieve their goals and then determine the success rates of their individual journey paths.
A journey must have calculations for funnel analysis.
- Open the existing journey that you want to analyze.
- In Edit mode, click Show conversion. Journey Analyzer calculates the conversion metrics.
- To examine the attributed metrics, click the + icon again in the upper right corner of the event. To hide the conversion metrics of an event, click the - icon in the upper right corner.
- To determine the journey that your customers followed, examine the Customers, Conversion rate, Dropped out and Moved forward metrics at the respective events.Example: The funnel analysis in the Bot Start event shows that 650 customers dropped out from the journey at this point, and 1052 customers Moved forward to Bot end, so Bot end has a conversion rate of 61.7%. This means that 61.7% of your customers proceeded to reach the Bot end session.
Notes:
- Always rename the events so that the journey is readable for any new users and to match the scenario.
- Journey Management lets you test your own hypotheses about user journeys. For example:
- You can model a scenario to test that if customers move through Bot A, do they escalate at a higher rate than the customers who go through Bot B? You can drag several Bot Start events to your journey, and set attribute filters for Bot A and Bot B, respectively.
- You can examine the impact of language. For example, measure if customers who engage with an English-speaking bot complete interactions as successfully as customers who engage with a French-speaking bot. In this analysis, you can use the language filter in the Bot Start event.
- You can work with Journey Flows to view patterns within flows to see if there are issues you want to explore. For example, if you see escalations, use Journey Analyzer to understand the nature of the escalation, the frequency, and the outcome.
Note: Journey Management and Journey Flows are two powerful tools that can complement each other, but they have several differences. For more information, see Differences between Journey Management and Journey Flows. - Performance views can also help you support your analyses; like Flow outcomes in Architect, the Queues Performance view, or the Interactions view in Workspace.
- The AppFoundry offers several templates that you can use to get started.
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