In the era of digital, a customer may spot your company’s name on a social media channel, read about your products on your website, initiate a request via mobile app and might like to communicate with your organization through email. In a nutshell, customer journeys are not linear anymore. They involve a lot of back and forth with multiple channels coming to play. For a business leader, like you, to understand and map a customer’s journey can be challenging. You need a holistic approach to delivering a consistent experience to your customers, irrespective of the buying stage, channel, place or time.
Customer Journey: Key Ingredient For a Superior Customer Experience
You may have made a lot of investments to enhance your web, mobile experiences, or any other front-end portals. This is good but not enough. Delivering a superior customer experience requires you to enable the end-to-end customer journey and not just the customer-facing front-end processes.
Customer journey today is not about a single process. It’s not even about a particular product or service. It’s the sum total of all the interactions of a customer with your organization connected to specific expected outcomes.
You must take into account the hundreds of operational processes, at the backend, required to support the customer-facing processes. Also, you need to focus on the customer’s context and their preferred channels.
Going Beyond the Front-End for a Seamless Customer Journey
Picture this – a customer first contacts an organization and she wants to learn about the products. At that time, she is evaluating options and would inquire about various offerings. Once, she decides and is on-board, the sale happens and thereafter she expects great customer service and support.
This is a typical example of a customer’s journey with an organization. What is important is that each interaction plays a key role in determining whether or not she will stay with your organization.
So, here’s what you can do to deliver a consistent experience across each touchpoint:
- Know your customer – Allowing your employees to access information at the right time is important for driving meaningful customer interactions. So, when a customer calls to inquire about a product, the least she expects is that she is greeted with her name and the executive is aware of her last inquiry and other demographic details.
- Streamline your processes – Key is not to focus just on the customer-facing processes but to support these processes with robust and efficient backend operations.
- Know what’s happening – Real-time insights and monitoring not only helps resolve bottlenecks but also ensures adherence to timelines.
- Think end-to-end – Mapping your customer’s journey also entails bridging various departmental and information silos. You need to connect your resources with fluid processes and seamless information flow.
To Conclude
Improving customer journeys require you to focus on your processes. Your customers don’t care about your legacy systems, rigid processes, manual interventions or any other challenges that you may face. They expect a great experience at every stage, across every channel.
In a recent webinar, featuring Rob Koplowitz, Forrester Research, we shared insights on the ingredients required for a delightful customer journey. Watch the webinar to know more!
