Organizations that fail to manage the cross-functional, end-to-end experiences that shape the customer’s view of the business can prompt a downpour of negative consequences, from customer defection and dramatically higher call volumes to lost sales and lower employee morale.
Most customers weren’t fed up with any one phone call, field visit, or other individual service interaction—in fact, most customers didn’t much care about those singular touchpoint events. However, solving the problem would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but the companies needed a whole new way of thinking about and managing its service operations to identify and reimagine the customer-experience journeys that mattered most.
In many cases, internal stakeholders are the keepers of the touchpoints that shape and measure how the company’s activities meet the customer’s journey. Whether because of poorly aligned incentives, management inattention, or simply human nature, the functional groups that manage these touchpoints are constantly at risk of losing sight of what the customer sees (and wants)—even as the groups work hard to optimize their own contributions to the customer experience.
Frustration about complex pricing for high-end equipment, confusion about promotions, and surprise over program lineups were all frequent causes of dissatisfaction later in the process, as well as frequent sources of queries to the company’s call centers.
[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=”null”]Companies need to recognize and address the fact that—at least, in most cases—they are simply not wired to naturally think about the journeys their customers take.[/inlinetweet] But those that want to transform the overall customer experience may need a bottom-up effort to create a detailed road map for each journey, one that describes the process from start to finish and takes into account the business impact of enhancing the journey and sequencing the initiatives to do so.
A company that effectively manages its customer journeys would still do the best job it could with the individual transaction—but its agents would also understand the context for the call, address the root cause for the customer’s query, and create the feedback loops to help the company continuously improve the wide range of upstream and downstream interactions that surround (and sometimes cause) the
Across industries, performance on journeys is substantially more strongly correlated with customer satisfaction than performance on touchpoints— and performance on journeys is significantly more strongly correlated with business outcomes such as revenue, churn, and repeat purchase.
[inlinetweet prefix=”null” tweeter=”null” suffix=”null”]Perhaps the biggest advantage is looking at your brand, product or service through your customer’s eyes, not as a marketer[/inlinetweet].
