This blog paves the route to customer success with Permanent Journey Plans. To trace the complete history of retail and commerce back to its inception, we must go down memory lane. Earlier, retail was more about trading goods and services in its simplest and most conventional form, such as bartering and peddling. Flash forward, we now have modern retail giants that have taken the way up to the Digital Revolution and adapted to e-commerce, alongside easing the entire retail process. Over the years, since technology has evolved and the world is on the brink of technological innovations, this has significantly impacted how organizations interact with customers using multiple touchpoints. Also, with Covid-19, the pandemic had upended socio-economic affairs to a greater extent. All of these factors coupled together affect customer experience. Technological practices have taken a toll due to a blurring line between differentiations.

Typically to ensure the sustainability of the business, companies face real challenges and fierce competition in today’s modern era, during which businesses are likely to be exposed to various impediments considering the ever-evolving technology. Amongst those, one of the retail sector’s significant problems is time management. But with the modified stages of development in the retail ecosystem, visualizing customer journeys has become vital.

Since the retailer base has escalated exponentially over the years, mobility around customer needs has mandated them to use multiple touchpoints for a seamless and unified customer experience.

This way, companies have designed their interactions on a granular level to incorporate human connection digitally for greater empathy. For more organized and mobilized customer needs in an even better way with the help of Customer Journey Maps.

Maps as a Visual Tool

These maps serve as a visual tool that helps organizations define their customers’ needs, problems, and engagement with the brand.

Used for effective project management, this tool is mapped around a timeline that plots every customer interaction with your business at various touchpoints, further adding up and building on customer experience.

Earlier, there was no visibility of the workforce productivity. Due to poor accountability, the productivity of the sales force team and sales trend of organizations suffered substantially. Teams needed a solution for teams to become more responsive and responsible to take complete ownership of the assigned sales targets, helping them reimagine the retail world through a new lens of experience.

Customer Experience

The future of customer experience is NOW! With the permanent journey plan (PJP) and route creation feature, customer journeys and personalization have become even more brilliant, more immersive and more trust enabling. Salesflo defines the customer journey and how it’s evolving over the years, giving organizations the ‘power to know’. These generate game-changing insights that inform influential customers against brand strategy, marketing insights, demand and real-time intelligence.

With the new experience of the retail paradigm, business workflows using Salesflo’s apps concerning the Permanent Journey Plan feature have become more systematic and defined, resulting in complete transparency of the sales force performance.

For a seamlessly better and unified experience, these digitized solutions help bridge the gap. It helps the sales force navigate their way and interact with the business at different touchpoints, yielding relatively good sales force productivity and escalated sales results. This feature is organized around delivering exceptional sales force experience to respond to the new and often unmet requirements to achieve the desired outcomes.

Once your current journey is visualized, you can reshape customer experiences as you start channelling interactions into different sequences. This eventually paves the way for digitized processes, reorienting organizational cultures as it creates a meaningful customer journey map that can drive change within the retail segment.

Focus Points in Permanent Journey Plan

• Give estimated time and plan for the journey
• Motivate your business to achieve its goal.
• Determine the ideal customer with your route plan
• Allow you to continue exploring the business model.
• A permanent journey plan costs less and gives recruited journey
• Permanent journey plan save your data, edit and manage your budgets whenever you wish.
• It will allow you to plan a full day of trips, create a recurring schedule, and notify it daily.

Digitized Processes

With the inception of digitized processes, organizations see businesses from a new lens of retail experience; a customer journey map is one of the foremost things retail businesses need to begin.

With the help of customer journey maps, organizations are armed with advanced analytics and insights to show why customers need to be at the forefront of the organization. They set a trajectory for their sales team using Customer journey planning analytics to gauge their performance. With this, they can now explore real-time insights into the customer journey using multiple channels and touchpoints. With the inception of digitized processes, organizations must see businesses from a new lens of retail experience; a customer journey map is one of the foremost things retail businesses need to begin.

Considering every business needs to keep tabs, capture marketing operations, and visualize interactions, the PJP journey is an integrated experience atlas that focuses on mobilizing employees with operational and service delivery touchpoints rather than on a single instance. The data is collected at such a granular level at multiple retail touchpoints.

Then it is used as fuel to enhance customer experience by analyzing current situations and generating helpful customer insights. These insights help organizations innovate and redefine sales force effectiveness and interactions as they drive a technology-led change. Therefore, the route creation feature has pushed the sales force to new limits. It will be like setting up a trajectory for them using customer journey analytics. While these analytics are helping organizations have a treasure trove of data about customers, after all, every journey is different!

Journey Planning Feature

The journey planning feature is used for app users’ route planning. It maps out the list of stores that defines how each of them is supposed to be covered efficiently. These visual PJPs reflect a network of stores area-wise and are made on the Web. Then they are reflected on Salesflo’s order-booking app, subsequently.

The PJP feature is affiliated with Primary and Secondary orders. Regarding Primary orders, distributors connect with the manufacturers directly to place their respective orders in a certain quantity. Manufacturers who have subscribed to our distribution management suite mandate the use of this software to their distributors for thorough visibility of brand sales

It further entertains distributors with the number of orders they need with reference to the required SKUs. Distributors plug in the desired SKUs/products they need under Primary orders, which then fall under the manufacturer’s SAP & ERP system. Here they reflect the same quantity of SKUs their distributors required.

As the distributor receives a confirmation/approval of the requested items by the manufacturer initially as per product availability, the ‘Dispatch Advice’ (DA) is created, showcasing processed orders in contrast with the orders placed.

Permanent Journey Plan WorkFlow

The Secondary order, however, is related to order to cash. For that, retailers punch in their orders to the distributors using the Salesflo app, while order-bookers initiate their journey by visiting consecutive stores following the PJP feature.

Upon reaching a store, the order-booker feeds in all the SKUs for placing the order. At day end, once the order-booker collects multiple orders by visiting different stores as assigned to him under the PJP. Then he syncs up the order-booking app, reflecting all the exact figures on the portal too. The delivery men then dispatch all of these to the respective stores.

Following this, distributors allocate stock against the order and generate an invoice for the same. This invoice is fetched by the delivery man against the generated load form. Same as the order gets dispatched for the stores following a similar journey plan.

Permanent Journey Plan Initiative (PJP)

The PJP initiative has significantly helped with cross-team collaboration, as it visualizes the process of seeing a brand’s performance. This customer journey spans the entire path to order placement and beyond as it binds cross-team collaborations and illustrates the overall customer experience regarding the distribution management system.