Do you really understand your customer’s journey?
Posted by Margot Birbeck on Tuesday, 22nd May 2018
Customer Experience is growing by leaps and bounds especially in terms of understanding touchpoint customer performance, but the primary challenge is still in the understanding of the actual customer journey.
There’s a conceptual customer journey which is typically modelled in the business, but it’s conceptual and often represents a preferred customer path. In reality, though, customers do different things, making it harder to help them achieve their goals.
These days, customers have a multitude of ways – or channels – through which they can interact with a company. Whether through a call centre, an app, or via email, today’s customers are expecting to be able to reach a company at any time of the day or night. And with social media now the most common platform through which customers can complain about poor service, we must make provision for great customer service across every channel.
That is close to impossible to achieve when the conceptual customer journey doesn’t resemble the real customer journey. If Mary usually follows up about her enquiry online, why is she phoning the call centre? And why has John applied for the same product three times, but not concluded the signup process?
It’s important to have a real time view of the customer path, including when customers get stuck in a loop or drop off. If real journeys versus modelled journeys can be displayed, and if segmentation is understood – the who and why – then interventions can be arranged to assist customers to achieve their goals. It’s about understanding why people do what they do, and Journey Analytics provides that understanding.
Keeping customers happy is an increasingly large part of what keeps executives awake at night. And customer happiness has increasing complexity when considered with the rising costs of acquisition because of fintech start-ups and aggregators; higher switching costs because of those same aggregators and fintech start-ups, and the resultant growing distance between service provider and client.
Future profits are ensured, more and more, through ecosystem services, which are essential for driving loyalty, but they also introduce complexity. The business still requires a single view of the customer as they touch a growing list of channels and products. Addressing these will enable improved acquisition, retention and cross selling.
Journey Analytics is key to gaining the single view of the customer that is essential to improved acquisition, retention and cross selling, and is the best way to gain the personal, contextual and emotional information that will allow employees to improve their interactions with customers. Knowing more about who the customer is, what they want, and what their pain points are enables not only interventions to resolve issues, but opportunities to market additional products and / or services to the customer.
Customer journeys are not linear, and they very seldom follow the preferred path. With a good understanding of the real customer journey, companies can revolutionise their interactions with customers and create new opportunities.
