In an age where digital transformation is becoming more and more commonplace, it is essential for businesses to understand the importance of customer experience journey in order to drive their digital transformation programs. It is no longer enough to simply offer a good product or service; customers now expect a good 360 degree experience as well. Every touchpoint of the customer experience journey (Technology or Non-Technology based) must be designed in order to ensure that customers have the best possible experience.
What Is Customer Experience Journey?
Customer experience (CX) journey is a term used to describe the end-to-end customer journey, including all the touchpoints (physical and digital) between the customer and your business. Without the journey design you might be losing focus on what to work on first to keep your customers happy and may even create problems for them during the journey.
Customer journey is every single touchpoint. It can begin when a customer first searches for a product or service that your business provides and continues until after they have made a purchase and sometimes even much longer. During this initial part of the journey, customers may assess the company’s website or app, its social media presence, customer reviews, customer support, etc., in order to make an informed purchase decision.
Once they have bought the product or service, they would engage on the onboarding/ delivery based on the product or service context and continue with customer service. This part of the journey may range from few seconds or hours to many months or even years.
By understanding their customers’ experiences throughout the CX journey, businesses can better tailor their products and services to deliver a phenomenal experience. This can help to increase customer loyalty, word of mouth and lead to more sales over time.
Additionally, by focusing on improving the personalised experience via digital transformation initiatives such as marketing and sales automation, CRM, AI-powered chatbots, WhatsApp bots, call center technologies, ecosystem integration etc companies can better engage with their customers in real-time and ensure that they are providing the best possible experience for them.
What Role Does It Play In Digital Transformation?
Customer experience journey is an integral part of building the digital transformation roadmap. It aims to ensure that customers have a positive and seamless interaction with a company’s services, products and content.
The customer experience journey begins by mapping out all the touchpoints that customers have with a company. This includes things like website or app journey, physical contact points where they are dealing with personnel, contact centre calls (inbound and outbound), emails, SMS and WhatsApp messages and social media interactions.
Not just the individual touchpoints, businesses also need to ensure that the context transfer is happening across the journey for a seamless experience. Ex you cannot be communicating different things on the website vs email vs call center employee.
Also by looking at the customer journey, it is important to understand what you expect your customers to feel, do or act at every single touchpoint (physical or digital) to create a positive experience. You also need to understand how much time you want the customer to spend on the specific touchpoint and design your Technology and or process accordingly.
This all can directly feed into creating initiatives and projects in your transformation roadmap.
Challenges & Opportunities
Digital transformation is a complex process, especially when it comes to setting up a customer experience journey that meets the needs of the business and its customers. It requires considered planning in order to be successful.
One challenge is that customer experience journeys need to be personalised as much as possible. This means that businesses must have access to detailed customer data and have the capability to use this data effectively in order to meet the needs of their customers. Furthermore, businesses must also ensure they provide an optimal user experience across all channels – whether it be online, on social media, or via traditional methods such as telephone calls – in order for their journey to be successful.
Another key challenge that I’ve seen and which could be more pronounced in older businesses is the existing Tech stacks that have little or no documentation. In an environment where tech debts have grown enormously and people who have implemented have either changed roles or moved on, there is a big challenge in crafting the existing journey points that a customer might be going through and businesses may not even know or understand why.
The opportunities for digital transformation are vast when properly implemented. A successful customer experience journey can help businesses increase revenue from existing customers by providing them with personalised offerings tailored specifically for them. Additionally, creating a seamless journey can improve overall customer satisfaction and loyalty by ensuring customers feel valued throughout the entire process and drive overall revenues.
Designing Your Customer 360 Journey
It is important to understand the end-to-end or 360 view that your customers take with your business. Every single process, touchpoint, technology, data and teams would need to be considered. I propose this be done by a dedicated team anchoring the overall process. I’ve done it several times within the construct of business excellence teams that I’ve personally led.
Finally, businesses should also consider how they can use customer feedback to gain insights into their experience journey and make changes where necessary in order to keep them engaged and satisfied. By taking a holistic approach to designing a customer experience journey, businesses can create a tailored experience that meets the needs of customers while also helping them reach their business objectives.
I wrote another detailed article on creating customer 360 which you can refer to design your journey.
Developing A Framework
Developing a framework for your customer experience journey is an important step to understand what all would need to be done, what projects need to be executed, who are the resources, how would it be measured etc.
I wrote a detailed article on customer experience framework that I’ve personally used several times over and you would also find it useful.
It is essential that all members of your team understand it and are part of the conversation. Communication is key so everyone can understand what is expected from them and how their role contributes to achieving the desired outcome. A framework goes a long way in meeting this objective and bringing everyone on the same page.
Conclusion
The next decade is definitely going to be dedicated to delivering great experience while the products and services are just a mere expectation. Businesses who do well in this aspect would be the winners. There has been no better time to invest into customer experience and get on with it now.
For any questions, or to bounce off ideas please write to me on mohit@moonshotscaling.com.
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