In most companies, executives know they must innovate in order to differentiate their offerings. They also know that for a long time the fragmented nature of their customer experience has been a problem, where what is usually found; is a basic journey that is performing poorly across the various functional areas and/or departments that support it.
The research identified consistency and clear communication as one of the most important elements of customer experience. Just recently, executives have understood the benefit of taking an end-to-end view of customer journey and the importance of understanding how interdependent individual touchpoints were along the journey.
It is important to know that a customer journey entails:
Episodes: A journey is a specific, discrete experience in the customer life cycle. The act of purchasing a product in a store is a touchpoint within a customer’s journey. Researching and then buying a new product and getting it up and running at home would constitute the full journey as the customer sees it.
End-to-end experience: It isn’t enough to measure customer satisfaction on a single touchpoint; what matters is the customer experience across the entire journey. It’s common to generate high individual touchpoints satisfaction scores which perhaps can give us the wrong idea that we are performing great; but when measuring the end-to-end journey, we get unacceptably low scores.
Language: Do people describe the journey events in the way a customer would? Or do we lapse into company-speak? We must get used to communicating in the customer’s language.
Channel: Are we multichannel or omnichannel? Does the client receive the same experience regardless of which channel he uses to communicate with us? A “new product purchase” trip could begin with a visit to the website, then a sales call, then a second visit to the website, perhaps followed by a visit to the store, then a call for technical help during the activation or installation stage. However, customer experience should be the same.
Duration: Journeys are usually longer than what we think.
Repetition: Journeys are repeatable and can be repeatable for a meaningful percentage of customers.
In most cases, companies are simply not wired about the journeys their customer takes. Thinking about customer journeys instead of traditional touchpoints can require an operational and cultural shift that engages the organizations across functions and from top to bottom. For the companies that master it, the reward is higher customer and employee satisfaction, revenue and cost improvement, and enduring competitive advantage.
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