The customer journey takes someone from the initial point of contact to the final service delivery. In much the same way as when we have a new dining experience, a customer will remember the lowest point (worst moment), the highest point (best moment), and how an experience ended.
Because the customer journey can vary widely in duration and complexity, it’s important to remember that even a good experience at one point in the process (e.g., setting an online appointment) can be canceled out by a poor experience later on (e.g., a poorly managed queue at your brick and mortar location).
Optimizing the customer journey across all touchpoints is arguably the single most important factor in maximizing the outcome of a customer visit. And yet, service providers often do not spend nearly enough time focusing on the customer experiences at the physical location. That oversight creates a potentially costly disconnect between the organization and the customer.
As operations move increasingly toward omni-channel, it’s more important than ever to take a fully integrated look at the total customer journey.
When a customer comes to visit a store, a branch or a hospital they go through a journey. The journey comprises a set of experiences. Those experiences shape how the customer will react as you deliver your messages and offer them different products and services. That journey is crucial to maximizing the value of your customer’s visit.(Picture by Qmatic)
Customer Journey Discovery and Management
With knowledge from thousands of client projects and with customer experience management as a guide, the company I work for employ a systematic approach we call Customer Journey Discovery to help organizations understand customer journeys and identify gaps in their service delivery model. The outcome and recommendations from the program assist companies to optimize the way current and prospective customers experience their environment and interactions.
The Customer Journey Discovery program documents how each individual touchpoint works and impacts the entire channel. By gathering actual experiential feedback from the staff, customer, and process perspectives, the program generates a holistic snapshot of where gaps and opportunities exist.
- The Staff Perspective considers how the staff perceives the customer experience, and where they see opportunities for improvement.
- The Customer Perspective considers every experience from arrival through departure. This input clarifies how effective, pleasant and productive the customer’s interaction was with the service environment and how the customer feels about the experience they’ve had – what mattered most, and where improvement opportunities could be made.
- The Process Perspective produces insight into the demands placed on the service environment by customers, and how well that demand is managed. It looks at the way customer issues are resolved and how actively opportunities are converted. It can assess the effectiveness of physical resources, the level of ROI you’re generating from the service environment, and what can be done to optimize each step of the journey toward the greatest outcome.
Ultimately Customer Journey Discovery uncovers every critical detail of the current customer journey. This level of fully integrated transparency gives you the targeted intelligence needed to design the optimum solution and to craft a comprehensive strategy for elevating the efficiency and quality of each experience for customers, staff, and environment.
Knowledge is power. Understanding your gaps and addressing them sooner, rather than later, enables your organization to reach its maximum potential.
