Organizations that want happier customers should look holistically at the entire customer journey. It’s not enough to goal individual touchpoints for improvements. Marketers need the big picture when it comes to customer experiences.
“The ability to concentrate on customer journeys and reorient your organization around customer journeys is the great ‘unlock’ for firms that are struggling, perhaps, to make progress with their customer experience scores and their programs,” said Joana de Quintanilha, VP, principal analyst at Forrester at The MarTech Conference.
Here are three big payoffs for organizations that determine to embrace a journey-centric approach.
1. Customer journeys concentrate on what your customers really need
Looking at the entire customer journey provides organizations with more information and insights about the customer’s intent. That’s because all the individual actions that customers take are now seen in context inside the entire journey.
“What are they trying to do, what are they trying to get done?” asked de Quintanilha. “[Customer journeys also provide] the context, the touch points, the channels, the location that they are in as they are trying to accomplish these goals.”
Additionally, marketers can gain insights into the emotion behind those interactions by measuring the level of engagement and sentiment.
“Bringing context and emotion together really helps us to understand and concentrate on what customers really need and to use that to deliver each customer-related and business results,” said de Quintanilha.
As an example, ING Financial Services used a journey-centric approach to learn more about each B2B customers and consumers. In some cases, customers were opening a checking account as an end goal to transfer money. But in lots of cases, there have been also secondary needs stemming from the latest account, akin to paying taxes.
When bank accounts were opened online, a few of these secondary needs weren’t being met. So ING found that it could make more customers completely happy, and spot more business opportunities, by meeting these secondary needs with the digital experience. These opportunities wouldn’t have been discovered with out a journey-centric approach.
2. Customer journeys can lead to higher revenue and reduce costs
Focusing on the entire journey lets organizations streamline processes and make them more efficient. Forrester research found that better customer journeys can improve customer advocacy 20% to 40% and reduce costs by 15% to 25%.
“We see that firms are using ‘journey-centricity’ to acquire customers, but additionally to upsell, to cross-sell and to drive retention, loyalty and customer lifetime value — so really, across that entire relationship with the customer,” said de Quintanilha.
For example, Nissan drove higher customer retention by specializing in seven key journeys and 55 moments of truth across digital and physical locations. When customer journeys are improved, organizations can drive higher revenue — 10% to 20%, according to de Quintanilha.
Dig deeper: 4 critical platforms to support customer journey orchestration
3. Customer journeys can disrupt your small business and operating model
It might sound counterintuitive, but disrupting your small business or operating model might help your customers, and their experiences, in the long term.
“Traditional operating models are, on the whole, very functional, but not at all times designed to deliver great experiences to customers and partners and suppliers,” de Quintanilha said.
In the case of food delivery orders, the customer experience has seen a change with food delivery apps. A pizza is likely to be made by an independent restaurant and delivered by a 3rd party. The customer service for the ordering app is likely to be managed by one other entity.
This transformation gives customers more convenience, but when there’s a breakdown in the experience, it might be difficult to pinpoint due to the multiple parties involved. This is why organizations need to take a look at the whole customer journey and make certain that silos are broken down in order that teams that were traditionally separate are working together for the sake of the customer.
“A customer on a journey doesn’t care in the event you belong to a marketing function, or IT, or product development or digital,” said de Quintanilha. “It’s just an individual trying to get something done, trying to accomplish a goal, sometimes a really functional goal, sometimes a more aspirational, more complex goal. We need to rationalize things inside our own organizations and create links — bridge silos — inside our own organizations so as to deliver better experiences.”
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