Get Ready for a Journey: Customer Experience is Changing
This is a post about going from good to best. Plenty of companies have gotten the message that customer experience matters. As more companies focus on the customer, they’re looking at how to improve customer satisfaction scores. As a customer, that’s great. However, it isn't enough for companies to improve call center performance or web site usability. We live in a multichannel world where channel-surfing customers hit all sorts of touchpoints before completing their task. It’s a journey now.
Doing well at one touchpoint is good, but it doesn’t matter if you haven’t created a great journey. And that matters because 56% of all customer interactions happen across a multichannel journey. For companies focusing on improving those touchpoints but ignoring the journey, it’s like not being able to see the forest for the trees.
The power of the journey really came through in this slideshow my colleague Dorian Stone recently presented (Customer Journey Analytics and Big Data). It highlights a few critical points for anyone interested in customer experience and growth:
■ Getting journeys right is critical to business success. Journeys are 30% - 40% more predictive of customer satisfaction and churn. Companies that provide excellent customer journeys are top performers in both customer experience and growth.
■ Understanding your customers’ journeys is a significant Big Data challenge. With all the touchpoints your customers hit, you need to not only get the data; you have to find the journey patterns between all those touchpoints to see where the leakages and opportunities are (McKinsey has invested in a joint offering with a company called Clickfox to address this critical point).
■ Excellence in customer journeys is about more than getting good customer satisfaction scores. Mastering journeys can lower costs (e.g. reduced calls to call centers), reduce customer churn, and increase cross-selling success.
Fix your customer touchpoints: good. Fix your customer journeys: better.
Which customer journeys are most important to your business?
Learn more about customer experience and other topics on the Chief Marketing & Sales Officer Forum site, and follow us on Twitter @McK_CMSOForum. And please follow me on Twitter @davidedelman.
[Image: BrianScott, Flickr]
'Deep Sales' advocate
11yCustomers don't think about BMW's mobile experience, or their contact center, or the dealer experience independantly - they just see the BMW brand. Before I made my last vehicle purchase, I started my journey on my laptop (not on company hours, of course ;), where I researched the latest models. I went back to work. That evening, after dinner, I used my iPad to go back and use the 'configurator' tool to build a car to my preferred specs...and went to sleep dreaming of the shiny new red sports car that would soon be in my driveway. That weekend, on the way to the dealer, my wife had to use her smartphone to find a location that was nearby, and likely to have my model in stock. I then took my car for a test drive, and it was everything I hoped it would be. The point I want to make, is that in BMW's eyes, because I used multiple channels/devices I was four different people. If either one of those experiences was sub-par, I may easliy changed my mind last minute and visited the Audi dealership next door. Provide a seamless, consistent experience across multiple channels, and you create an experience that people will talk about...like I just did.
Customer & Employee Experience (CX/EX) | Data-Driven CX Design & Execution | Advisor & Speaker
11yGood straightforward preso. While I like the Core Beliefs on your last content slide (13), I'd like to respectfully point out that the "customer" is completely missing from your core beliefs. I can see that it could be omitted from point #2 but otherwise the customer needs to be reflected in the other 3 beliefs, particularly #3. It has to be "customer first" and business strategy hypothesis driven. This preso is all about the "customer" and customer journeys, and I know that it's all about changing the way we go about "business" but we have to purposely put the "customer" - the word itself - into all discussions especially within "core beliefs," or else our folks won't think we're serious about it. Thanks for considering my comment.
Great Article, A few things that companies fail to realize: 1. The journey is different for each customer. So how do you openly communicate throughout various touch points to build the right experience? 2. How do you understand to which degree various touch points matter to individuals to tailor their experience? 3. Lets not become so consumed in data that we stop listening to people. 4. Invest strategically into the magic of the experience and they will love the journey
Human Resource Director at Dynamic BDC
11yAs a Manager and now as an HR Professional, I have always employed the "moment of truth" philosophy to customer service. If every person who encounters the customer (from the front line sales people, to management, to the social media team), believes that every single interaction with the customer is a "moment of truth" and genuinely strives, in a positive way, to ensure that the customer is treated spectacularly, each of those "moments of truth" will contribute to the overall tapestry of excellence that strengthen and build a company. This is especially critical in our transparent and instantaneous society, whereby consumers post on their Facebook or Twitter pages, or the company's, how they feel about how they are/were treated. I like the "journey" analogy; it should serve as a reminder to all of us that, as with any journey, it is very easy to take a "wrong turn" - which could end up having disastrous results.
Chief Sales Officer (CSO) at Climate Transition | Edge Computing | Clean Energy for All | Decarbonization | Electrify Everything
11yEspecially true now that there's no clear map to the answer for consumers. Wandering is expected of the savvy client. And plotting that path is now a hard cost for the provider - retaining the customer while growing revenue is expected in your customer-facing tools. Lots of effort required to drive even a few percentage points...