In this three-part series, we deep dive into Customer Journey Maps - a super useful tool for understanding your customers' biggest problems and how to solve them. In today's article, you will learn the basics of what a Customer Journey Map is and how you can use it.
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series on Customer Journey Mapping, we established the importance of Customer Journey Mapping to your business and the anatomy of high-performance Customer Journey Maps. Now, In Part 3, we will be highlighting the positive impact an integrated Customer Journey Mapping program can have on companies just like yours.
Never underestimate the power of good Customer Experience (CX) design. It's been transformational for many of our clients. These clients were precisely where you are now: looking up at the mountain of challenges and goals, and wondering how on earth they would overcome them. With our help, they committed themselves to the outcome they wanted, and now they're reaping the benefits.
What makes a customer experience great?
It's the feeling you get when each of the customer touchpoints works together perfectly to give you what you need, exactly when you need it - without any drama or hassle. A customer's experience is going to be dependent on how well a business can walk in the customer's shoes. The better a business can do this, the better customer needs and pain points are addressed.
That's the goal we help our clients achieve.
Customer experience design is a process that helps businesses understand their customers' needs and develop strategies to improve customer satisfaction. A key part of this process is customer journey mapping. As stated in our previous Customer Journey Map blogs, customer journey mapping allows you to transform qualitative research (survey customers, interviews, focus groups) into a visual representation that shows exactly how a customer interacts with your business now and what the average customer would want to be fixed.
Is it worth engaging a customer experience expert?
If you conduct a quick google search you could probably find a customer journey map template that would help you understand your customer's perspective on your existing customer experience strategy. What Proto Partners are really good at doing is helping you solve the problems. It is all well and good to conduct research but that information is useless unless you know how to use it to make your customer experiences even better.
That's why we treat a customer journey map as a step, not a result. We want to help you create a service blueprint that improves how customers interact with you across the different customer touchpoints.
Below are some customer journey mapping examples and the solutions that came of them.
Eliminating Frustrating Call Centre Interactions
The Problem
- Dealing with over 500,000 interactions per year, the call centres of a large telecommunications company were experiencing high customer churn and universally negative feedback.
- The company itself wanted to move beyond a price-based strategy to attract and retain a growing share of customers. As part of this, they wanted to increase customer advocacy by eliminating the frustrating elements of their call centre experience.
The Solution
- By mapping the customer journeys, we were able to identify the critical components of great customer interaction and the characteristics and behaviours of an excellent customer service team.
- Using customer research tools to focus on both staff and operational processes, we were able to identify that the 41 point phone call checklist was too restrictive and was removing the sense of warm human engagement from customer interactions.
- We developed a 6-month training program with their call centre in Manila, which included the teaching of ideal call flows, customer experience scorecards, grading standards and explanatory videos.
The Benefits
- By simplifying and personalising the customer experience, you create a customer journey that target customers want to be part of.
- We helped the customer achieve their customer churn reduction targets and exceed customer satisfaction targets to +25 NPS.
- Providing a dynamic and personalised customer experience throughout the customer journey is key to maintaining a positive customer experience. Through the use of a customer journey map, we were able to remove the factors that were preventing that kind of experience, all while stripping out more than 20% of our service costs in under 12 months.
Improving Customer Engagement
The Problem
- A sizeable Australian superannuation company wanted to improve their customer engagement. Companies that lack consistent customer engagement lose the opportunity to generate loyalty, sales and insights from customer feedback.
The Solution
- Through the Journey Mapping process, we were able to step into the shoes of the customer across a number of touchpoints and channels. This allowed us to empathise with how they experienced the company and what measures we could take to enhance that experience.
- Once the interactions were mapped, we were able to identify key factors that prevented the delivery of a ‘Wow the Customer' experience. We highlighted insights, emotions and areas of opportunity which would allow the client to improve their customer's journey significantly.
The Benefits
- As a result of integrating our insights into their customer strategy, our client was able to provide, inspiration and guidance to their employees to improve their customer engagement. This ultimately led to them delivering on their customer's idea of a ‘Wow' experience.
Upgrading The Onboarding Process
The Problem
- One of Australia's four largest banks was looking to create an onboarding process that would encourage new customers to sign on for additional services.
- With almost 1200 branches, many different service offerings, wide-ranging distribution channels and multiple communication and feedback channels, the customer journey had become overly complicated. This prevented the bank from offering a personalised and straightforward onboarding process that highlighted its range of additional services.
The Solution
- We conducted an in-depth customer survey of 1555 responses, listened to 300 customer phone calls and spoke to over 40 internal and external customers. This allowed us to thoroughly map the Customer Journey and identify significant insights that became the basis of a new customer engagement framework.
The Benefits
- As a result of improving the Customer Journey Mapping process, three key focus areas were identified which would vastly improve the likelihood that a new customer would switch to a more expansive and valuable transactional banking relationship. This ultimately led to the creation of a new all-inclusive credit card to better meet both the client's and their customers' needs.
Empowering Staff Engagement
The Problem
- A large Australian cinema operator wanted to create customer loyalty by empowering their staff to consistently deliver an outstanding customer experience that was meaningful and relevant.
- This plan required a clearer understanding of the current reality for their customers and team, increasing the customer experience capability of the frontline team and gaining alignment across the organisation.
The Solution
- Through the Customer Journey Mapping process we discovered four significant themes which now form the basis of the client's new customer strategy. By studying their customer's needs, they were able to differentiate themselves from their competitors by providing an excellent customer experience.
- The key driver in this strategy was to empower their 3,000 staff, which allowed them to deliver the ideal cinema experience to their customers in 75,000 seats across 600 locations.
The Benefits
- By understanding what matters to their customers and communicating it to their staff, our client was able to move from a purely transactional model to an experiential one. Ensuring that an ‘outstanding customer experience' is an essential part of any business leads to increased customer loyalty.
If you can relate to these situations within your own business, get in touch to get started before you lose more time.
Do you distinguish your customers, their needs and how you can best deliver them? Do you value relevant insights? Are they part of your CX strategy?
That all sounds pretty simple right?
Now think about how many different types of customers you have and how many touch-points they use to connect with you. Perhaps it’s not so simple after all.
Companies that excel as customer-centric organisations show 6 distinct characteristics. These characteristics provide a clear framework for you to base your actions on, and their implementation has clear benefits which we will reveal in our next blog.
In the meantime, if you have any questions about Customer Journey Map templates or would like to find out how you can get one for your organisation, email experience@protopartners.com.au to receive more detailed information and pricing.
