If you are a business Entrepreneur or a business owner and are not paying attention to your customer experience and their experience needs and pains, you may just be missing a key ingredient to building a successful business.
In today’s digitised world one would think that Customer Experience or CX, should be handled competently and with ease, but this is far from the reality experienced by most consumers and customers in the marketplace.
According to the 2023 South African Customer Experience report, South African consumers’ expectations of what constitutes quality customer experience is disturbingly low. While this does create opportunities for organisations who invest in delivering quality customer care, it suggests that all too few companies have recognised how transformative an effective CX strategy could be to their bottom lines.
The other astonishing insight from the report is that most consumers still get a better outcome by visiting a business branch or store to resolve issues than by any digital engagement, with 67% of consumers choosing this as their top option. The closest digital channel for resolving issues was e-mail at 44% and WhatsApp at 40%.
Every business’s bread and butter is its customers. Yet, not all businesses appreciate that the best product or service in the world does not guarantee a sale or customer retention. One of the most important things a business can do is to map its customer journey and improve and optimise its customer experience (CX).
Martie De Beer, CCaaS Executive Telviva has provided Business Tech Africa a breakdown of creating a customer service journey map that is a great tool to assist businesses in building a solid CX experience for their customers and it follows below:
At its simplest, customer journey mapping is you, as an organisation, putting yourselves in the shoes of your customers to experience what they experience. You do this to ask: What experience do my customers currently have and what experience do I want them to have with my brand?
“Touch points” refers to how customers engage with your systems, processes and people. Where do they “touch” the business? Customer journey mapping, and deeply understanding all the touch points, is an incredibly rewarding exercise but to get the most out of it, you must have clearly defined objectives.
Benefits of mapping your customer journeys
A thorough customer journey map enables you to understand your customers’ behaviour, pain points, expectations and preferences. This is vital to stop repeating the same mistakes.
The exercise empowers you to improve your customer satisfaction levels. Let’s be honest, customers often give feedback either directly or through their actions but these insights end up in a deep hole of nothingness, for lack of a better description. Many businesses don’t use satisfaction scores, net promoter scores or the voice of the customer effectively. What would effective look like? At what point in the customer journey did we get this feedback? Which channel was used, and is it the channel that resulted in a good or bad experience? Was it after a sales issue or a faulty product or service?
Perhaps the most exciting benefit is identifying opportunities for enhancement and change. Consider this: We live in an era of evolving technology and the need to adapt our systems and processes. But, if I change one dimension in my system, what impact will it have on my customers? If an organisation is actively managing its customer journey it will know exactly whether a system change will have a positive or negative impact on its customers, and what to do about it.
Mapping the customer journey
Customer feedback: You cannot optimise if you don’t have an accurate understanding of the voice of the customer. If you don’t have a customer feedback strategy in place, then this becomes a priority.
Understand the touch points: There is a great deal of insight that can be gathered from each touch point in a business. A business should interrogate the channels, systems, phone numbers, times of interaction, moments of automation, human-led interactions, and more.
Define the customer phases or stages: A customer journey map gets pulled into two dimensions, the first being customer phases or stages. There isn’t a universal number of phases as it will depend on your defined objectives. These phases include things such as awareness, acquisition, maintenance and retention. Of course, customers go through a lot during those phases and that leads to the next dimension.
Define the customer steps within the various phases: Here, the map goes into granular detail of the actual steps in each phase. This is about zooming in to all the components of the customer journey precisely because the point of the exercise is to improve and optimise. If a customer has to go through laborious and repetitive steps of filling in his or her details, for example, how can this be addressed with automation?
Map your as-is state and work towards your to-be state: There are many tools that businesses can use to map their customer journey through phases, steps, touchpoints, systems, processes and people. This involves a great deal of consultative work with your partner but is imperative to accurately capture your as-is state, and then with the experience of your partner, plot a to-be that improves and optimises your customer journey and, ultimately, CX.
Validation:This is an important step, where the organisation and partner interrogate whether everything has been captured and is an accurate representation of the customer journey. This validation enables you to translate the insights into opportunities for optimisation.
Breathe life into your map to find moments that matter: The customer journey map needs to be a living document. It needs to be analysed consistently to find opportunities for more improvement and efficiency.
The 2023 South African Customer Experience report highlights that that the problem with addressing good CX, may lie with processes, with too many professionals stuck on only the process but lose sight of the business objective that exceptional CX has to offer. Journey maps, service canvas, design thinking, and the like are certainly very helpful tools to use. However, It’s also easy to use these to the letter and fail to deliver improved CX outcomes because the tools of themselves do not create better outcomes. Understanding the customer objective and how to genuinely connect with them to produce these outcomes as guided by the tools and frameworks is what ultimately will make the difference to your customers
