COVER STORY OF THE MONTH
CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPS IN UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMER EXPECTATION
The real test of any business is whether it can attract and retain customers. Customers are indeed a very valuable productive resource and are most often the main reasons that prospective clients reach out to enterprises. Increasing lifetime value (LTV) of a customer is an important metric in determining the future success of an enterprise.
But this is far challenging than we think. Given today’s digital age where customers have easy access to massive amounts of information, customer loyalty is not what it used to be. Understanding customer expectation and having 360 view to customer, to be able to provide superior experiences is a real catalyst to get to the desired increase in LTV.
Designing and providing great customer experience has often been thought off only as a marketing or customer service function. Several enterprises still operate with a siloed view of what constitutes great customer experience. A customer may interact with a brand over several touchpoints. While enterprises may be looking to perfect experiences across these individual touch points and receive great customer feedback, yet customers may still be unhappy with the overall interaction. At the heart of the problem is the way processes within enterprises are structured, to reflect only a very compartmentalized view of the process. Individual process owners have little visibility into what interactions preceded their interactions and what ensued. This leads to a break up in the supply chain causing a lot of confusion and resultant overall customer dissatisfaction.
This is where a 360 view of the customer assumes importance. This involves participation from every relevant functional unit within an enterprise to define customer journeys and embed them into the business model. A customer journey map represents the various stages in the lifecycle of a specific customer over time and across channels, as they accomplish a specific goal. This includes what they go through as they engage with an enterprise – their experience in comparison to their expectations and their consequent perceptions of the brand. The first step in this process is to identify the persona (characteristics, need, behavior, opinions and pain points) of the customer taking this journey and craft a map to cover each customer segment. This is in fact the most important step given that people are different and the perception of experience for one customer may not match with another. The timeline needs to be defined – this could either be a finite amount of time or variable based on phases based on the buying cycle.
The other important aspect is channels. Where an enterprise provides an omni-channel experience, it becomes all the more critical to respond quickly and helpfully regardless of the channel. Enterprises get tremendous amounts of data from communications with customers both before, during and after the sales cycle. It’s a massive amount of data including operational data across functions at each touch point. We can now capture and process this data in real time to generate insights, get an understanding on which journeys have the biggest impact and use this insight for decision making. The entire customer touch point data needs to be looked at together rather than individually. These data points need to be made available to relevant business stakeholders to make smart decisions. Doing this research means not only bringing together new types of information across marketing, operations and competitive information, but also combining it to understand customer journeys. Omni-channel analytics is just one part of driving the overall experience – other ways being explored to understand customer experience include artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Execution and Driving Improvements
The execution entails not only building cross functional processes but also involves change management at a cultural level to ensure continuous improvement. Some studies around good practices relating to execution reveals that after enterprises have identified customer journeys and got a firm understanding of the underlying problems, business leaders refrain from the temptation of dictating remedies and solutions. The root cause of the issues were identified by involving cross functional teams given the possibility that the issue is due to cross functional disconnects. Meetings between functional unit representatives were held, to understand the problem better and come up with powerful and sustainable solutions that is sponsored by all functions. These teams discussed the potential complexity that could arise during myriad hand-offs and the multiple places where there is a possibility that the ball could drop. Once they clearly identify challenges in theirs and other operational group processes, they then sit and design the new approach and brainstorm solutions. Finally, they do involve customers to validate their approach and confirm that this would please them.
The result was a process that provided far more overall customer satisfaction and was much more cost efficient, leading to revenue growth in the mid run.
Of course, redesigning the new process and ensuring its rigorous execution is one part of the challenge. However, long term success is dependent on scaling and sustaining such transformation projects for which sponsorship and adoption by business users is very crucial. This goes far into adjusting performance metrics, incentives and reviewing the hiring process to support the success of such journeys. This also means that the central leadership team takes ownership to support the enterprise in order to break away from past biases and strongly lead the cultural change, especially during the early years. The organization should be structured such that senior people from respective functions should become responsible for overseeing specific journeys and conduct regular reviews with the stakeholders to ensure progress.
Customer journey maps help enterprises understand their customers better in order to provide them superior experiences. It is time that enterprises seriously re-look at their customer lifetime value metrics vs. their customer experience feedback scores to determine gaps and define an execution plan to meet that gap. As a famous quote goes “The customer experience is the next competitive battleground”. It is indeed time for enterprises to equip themselves to come on top.
