Airship launches Airship Journeys to simplify management of customer engagement paths

TGI Fridays is an early user of the new solution

Customer engagement firm Airship has released Airship Journeys as part of its Customer Engagement Platform. It’s a new visual interface that it says makes customer engagement simpler and dramatically more effective for marketers. Airship Journeys combines the power of visual sequencing and cross-channel branching with glanceable views of goal-based performance, and is designed to make it easy for marketers to quickly create, manage and adapt customer engagement paths with a few clicks.

Airship Journeys aims to address frustrations with ‘drag-and-drop’ journey-builder tools, which it said generate convoluted diagrams that are difficult to create and nearly impossible to understand, analyse and modify. A November 2019 Airship survey of marketers found that more than 40 per cent deemed their efforts to manage multichannel digital communications as unsuccessful and more than half said they either have difficulty or can’t identify their best-performing journeys. Over-messaging is a concern to more than 70 per cent, while 55 per cent are also concerned about under-messaging.

“Legacy visual builders were created for an email- and desktop-centric world with far fewer channels and little concern for where a customer was or what they were doing,” said Airship CEO and president, Brett Caine. “They’ve become complex and bloated in failed attempts to adapt to the new era where the customer experience is all about mobile and in-the-moment responsiveness, with many more channels and a much greater expectation that interactions are personalized and contextually relevant. Airship Journeys embeds a decade of mobile expertise and proven AI into a completely new approach to ensure that marketers are successful and their customers have an amazing experience.”

Airship Journeys enables marketers to send the right messages to the right customers across apps, websites, email, SMS, mobile wallets and more. Messages can be directed according to priority channel, customer’s preferred channel or fallback channel. A unified message composer allows messages to be composed once and then sent across multiple channels.
In addition, Airship Journeys incorporates cross-channel branching that automatically adjusts in real time to respond to a customer’s behaviour. It monitors and controls message frequency and uses Predictive AI to segment audiences and automatically re-engage lapsed customers

“I really like the ease of use, and linking the send time between messages, which helped increase productivity for our team,” said Conner Fryoux, digital product manager at TGI Fridays, who has tried the new took. “Airship Journeys makes it easy to see what the user experience will look like and share that view internally. Im eager to test out new use cases, and our leadership team is pleased to see more customers come through our doors.”

Sam Kirwan, app marketing specialist at Ding.com. and another early user, said: “Airship Journeys allows us to make quick decisions and adapt critical journeys on the fly, from driving feature adoption and app store ratings, to increasing transaction frequency at key moments in the lifecycle, all while taking full advantage of our own predictive models and historical data. The massive benefit is that Journeys has freed up our time, allowing us to examine cohorts at different life stages and apply more testing as we revamp our lifecycle marketing holistically – no small feat considering our customers span more than 140 countries.”