PathFinder - An Overview

PathFinder - An Overview

Important release information:
PathFinder is available only for those users who have subscribed to the early access program. This will not be available for other customers until public launch. Watch this space for updates.

As technology advances, customers are expecting personalized attention and on-demand solutions for their problems—in other words, a great customer experience. However, your business infrastructure being a complex maze, how do you formulate relevant and contextual CX strategy that resonates with your customer expectations at each juncture?

The first step is to understand your customers and discover their journey within your business.

Getting a comprehensive idea of who your customers are and how they interact with your business landscape reveals a lot about their experience. The interactions they have with your business are like breadcrumb trails. Tracing them will help you understand their travel, their behavior, their response, and their experience.

In business terms, each of your prospects approaches your business with different goals and they access different touchpoints available in your business. They will complete their journey,get stagnated in a stage, or even drop their interaction all together. While there could be multiple reasons as to why they behave in a certain way, the primary mode of finding them all is by mapping their journey with your business.

So, how do you map journeys?
The conventional way to create customer experiences is to think up various fictional personas and goals based on the popular transactions and simulate their behavior and journey. They chart down presumed experience and emotions at each stage and formulate different offerings that could cater for their timely needs. It could look something like this:


This is the sort of journey map, businesses have been creating for a long time to understand customer behavior and tailor customer experience. As you can see, this map is hypothetical in nature and the interactions are not realistic. For an extensive understanding of your customer behaviors and to make real changes, you need a systematic tool that can generate paths based on real time interactions.

PathFinder in Zoho CRM

PathFinder in Zoho CRM is a tool built to capture live interactions with your business as signals and record them as unique paths, also known as journeys. It depicts the paths in three different graphical reports, to comprehend the observed journeys better.
These reports will unveil all the paths taken in your business and help you infer different findings at once. For example, a completed path could indicate an accomplished journey, a broken path could indicate the presence of roadblocks or pain points, or a looped path could indicate the visitor is reconsidering their decision. This is why it's important for businesses to identify their path or route, including how they travel, where they are getting stagnated, which paths are popularly used, or even which paths are unused. With insights like these, you can:
  1. Optimize the quality and responsiveness of your touchpoints
  2. Identify, resolve, or remove unproductive touchpoints
  3. Discover your customer personas and patterns
  4. Develop cross-selling and up-selling sales targeting strategies
  5. Design, orchestrate, and streamline your process based on the customer behavior
  6. Manage your (marketing) spends on the right touchpoints
  7. Orchestrate personalized and contextual customer experience at each step of their journey
  8. Connect and facilitate cross-channel journeys through different products
  9. Proactively arrest customer churn or drop-outs happening during the journey. 

Availability
PathFinder is available for Enterprise and Ultimate editions only.
Limits on the number of new records that PathFinder can capture based on edition only.
  1. Enterprise: Upto 50,000 records per day across all processes.
  2. Ultimate: Upto 1,00,000 records per day across all processes.
Limits on the number of transitions performed based on edition:
  1. Enterprise: Upto 1,00,000 transitions per day across all processes.
  2. Ultimate: Upto 2,00,000 transitions per day across all processes
Permission Required
Users with the Administrative profile can access this feature.

Let's explore different scenarios PathFinder could be used:

Business Scenarios

Discover paths taken on your business and orchestrate a favorable journey

Scope: Examine, optimize, and streamline an existing process with PathFinder

Zylker & Co. is a national bank offering a wide range of products, services, and tools for their personal banking consumers. To reduce their manual efforts in their operations, they'd like to automate and orchestrate their lead generation, qualification, and conversion process with an equal eye for CX. However, to streamline a process that will be relevant to the consumers and the business, they have to identify how their prospective consumers are onboarded in the first place. You can understand from the case that the business is trying to streamline an existing process. While it may vary case to case, PathFinder can help find the average "actual picture" of the process and connect all the data points such that they can orchestrate a robust process using Journey Builder. See also: Orchestrate journeys using Journey Builder.

Discover Journey to optimize product placement for a retail store

Scope: Track customer journey, strategize cross-selling with PathFinder
Zylker.com is an online electronic shop that sells a range of products to cater various domestic technology needs. For the ease of convenience, they have categorized their products under different sections - storage, mobile devices, computing devices, networking, and accessories. As you can see, these products are a right fit to buy as a combo. However, they are struggling to discover which combination shall be coupled for best traction. While they can always track their best-selling product, one thing they need is to know how their prospects are choosing that particular product. It's important to understand what their original goal was when they entered the site, which product did they access the rest of the products in the cart from, what initiated the navigation, and so on. PathFinder can help them identify this journey of visitors between different products.
The objective of Zylker.com is to identify popular paths and recommend best-selling products as a combo.

  1. InferenceLaptop is the product often sought, and visitors are looking for a mouse in many of their journeys after they have looked at a laptop. Coupling or suggesting these two products, will be a strategic cross-sell. The same goes with a mouse and headphones.
  2. There is also an observation: Visitors who search for a landline phone are considering mobile device and accessories.

Assess user behavior in a retail store

Scope: Understand and decipher customer behavior.

Zylker.com is a novel online electronic store, trying to understand the behavior of visitors on their site.They'd like to understand how visitors moves through their site, in order to decide upon UX strategies, targeted sales, how to allocate marketing spends, and more.
As a platform, they have multiple touchpoints that users access in no particular order, including:
  1. Sign up to the site
  2. Subscribe to the newsletter
  3. Explore products
  4. Email with an enquiry
  5. Start a chatbot conversation
  6. Check eligibility
  7. Use tools on the site to check the product dimensions virtually
  8. Add products to wish lists
  9. Remove products from wish lists
  10. Add products to cart
  11. Explore the blog
  12. Take up a quiz
  13. Choose between different payment aggregators
  14. Choose a desired method of payment

PathFinder can analyze all types of journeys taken on their site and report them using graphical interpretations. At any point, if there is an unproductive or stagnant touchpoint, they can remove or correct it before it causes loss to the business. 
Thus, the basic algorithm of PathFinder is to capture signals and connect them to form a path. It can identify any paths or process observed in your business. What makes the difference is your objective and the configuration you make.

Supplementary resources on PathFinder

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