Companies have long emphasized touchpoints to enhance customer experience. But it isn’t enough; there’s a more important issue: The customer’s end-to-end journey.
There is a misunderstanding. When most companies focus on customer experience, they in fact are thinking about touchpoints: The individual transactions through which customers interact with parts of the business and its offerings. An at a certain point it makes some sense, since it reflects organization and accountability, and is relatively easy to build into operations. Companies try to ensure that customers will be satisfied with the interaction when they connect with their product, customer service, sales staff, or any other area within the company. But this siloed focus on individual touchpoints misses what customers really remember: Their end-to-end experience. Only by looking at the customer’s experience through his or her own eyes, it is possible to meaningfully improve performance.
Customer journeys include many things that happen before, during, and after the experience of a product or service. Journeys can be long, stretching across multiple channels and touchpoints, and often lasting days or weeks. Just think how many functional areas, processes and people are involved, and the negative implications of people failing to perform, processes not delivering the expected outcomes or functional areas not collaborating with each other and working in silos.
Organizations that fail to appreciate the context of these variables and to manage the cross-functional, end-to-end experiences that shape the customer’s view of the business can cause negative consequences, from customer attrition and dramatically higher call volumes to lost sales, bad reputation and lower employee morale. In contrast, those that provide the customer with the best experience from start to finish along the journey can expect to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty, improve sales and retention, reduce end-to-end service costs, and strengthen employee experience.
This is especially true in today’s multi-touchpoint, multi-channel, and hyper-competitive consumer markets. The explosion of potential customer interaction points across new channels, devices, applications, and more; makes the consistency of service and experience across channels practically impossible, unless the whole journey is being managed and not simply the individual touchpoints.
The functional groups that manage touchpoints are constantly at risk of losing sight of what the customer sees and wants; even if they work hard to optimize their own contributions to the customer experience.
An excellent customer experience must last the entire journey. The effort is worthy: A higher customer experience leads to higher revenue growth.
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In our next article, learn more about journeys versus touch points.
