A critical part of getting customer experience right is effectively mapping the customer journey, and more importantly – finding the customer’s “moment of truth.” This is the part of the journey that makes or breaks the experience, but many companies fail to understand what the moment is, let alone ensure it’s exceeding expectations.
When done right, moments of truth can create a happy customer for life. When done wrong, you not only risk losing that customer forever, you also risk bad word-of-mouth marketing and a negative brand perception. In the age of social media where everything is just a few clicks away from becoming a viral post or meme, this can be exponentially detrimental to a brand. However, with advances in technologies like AI, RPA and process mining, businesses have an opportunity to effectively understand and refine their moments of truth – greatly improving the customer experience and creating a happy customer for life. It isn’t always about the direct interaction between the customer and a brand representative, though. Most often, understanding the moments of truth means looking at the entire end-to-end business processes.
Understanding the Customer’s Experience
The first thing to understand is that the customer journey is about the customer. It’s not about what you think you know, but rather what the customer perceives. The customer defines what the steps are, how they interact with you, and what and where the various touchpoints are. As an organization, it’s important to analyze where you can be prepared but also to know where you may lose the customer along the way.
Organizations need to get inside the mind of the customer – understand what’s driving them, what’s their sentiment? Are they happy? Frustrated? Are they expecting something else? This is vital to ensuring the phases of the customer journey, and to pinpointing the moments of truth along the way. This is also where technology can be used to analyze behavior patterns on both an individual basis and across broader usage patterns. Let’s look at a wireless provider as an example. Say you have a customer that’s visited your website multiple times, and each time they visit the same service page looking to upgrade their wireless plan. They get all the way to the checkout and payment phase each time, but they never complete the purchase. This tells us something is breaking down for them, preventing them from making the final decision. Now we know that this is their moment of truth, when it’s time to make the transaction.
The real value of technology, however, is in finding repeat make-or-break moments across multiple customers. Machine learning technology can be used to comb through data from all customers, and find what the common themes are – where is the customer journey process breaking down? Once a brand identifies and understands the moments of truth, they can work on improving them and avoid making the same mistakes across their customer base.
How Technology Can Improve Outcomes
Every customer touchpoint is critical for the customer experience. Where the journey breaks down, however, is not always due to direct interaction with your brand – rather, it’s the back-end processes that are enabling the journey. This is where technology can help by analyzing processes and customer data, and suggesting improvements.
Let’s revisit the wireless provider example above, where a customer was adding the same service upgrade plan to their cart, but never completing the purchase. Technology such as RPA can be used to automatically detect this, and do something to help them through their journey. In mapping their journey, we gain insights into what could be causing the issue – perhaps the service plan page was lacking certain info, or the price in the cart was different than the list price. To help them along their journey, technology can proactively comb the page for missing info, or directly assist by suggesting a pop-up chat box that asks if they have any questions or would like to chat with a representative. This assists the customer with helpful, well-timed support, while helping them through the purchase funnel more seamlessly. Considering the wireless industry is a notoriously competitive space, it’s critical the company understands and fixes this process quickly before customers turn to competitive plans instead.
Every customer journey is unique, but better understanding their point of view – as well as a brand’s own business processes – enables companies to exceed expectations and more effectively retain customers. That being said, using a customer journey for marketing is just the tip of the iceberg. If the customer journey is mapped, it should be used to inform decisions at every level of the organization. It’s not just about targeting better, but about the end-to-end experience, and ends long after the marketing person potentially influences the customer’s decision. Customer experience is about the full operations and should be treated as such.
