A BAPTISM BY FIRE FOR ORGANISATIONS
By Syed Ibrahim Saajid
Customers have always been treated as the core of any organisation’s success. However, the approach of catering to the customers have changed drastically over the history of marketing literature and practice. Initial point of view of handling customers was from a customer service approach, where organisations perceived customer interaction only during the sales process or when the customer needed a service. Later this concept morphed into customer experience management approach. At this stage, every interaction with customer was seen as delivering an experience to the customer. Organisations also started thinking about multiple touchpoints of interaction, both internal and external to the firm. This includes a business crafting their social media or creating their very own customer engagement platform. Latest development into this field presents the concept of customer journey management. In order to have a holistic understanding of a customer’s interaction with the organisation throughout his entire lifecycle, a journey approach is most practical and beneficial for customers and the firm.
Customer Journey Management
Customer journey refers to a series of interactions a customer has with the organisation over time in order to achieve a particular purpose. Customer journey management is simply all activities the organization performs in order to plan, design, execute, and measure these customer interactions. The biggest revolution of customer journey management concept is that it looks into all interactions with customers from the perspective of the customers, not the organisation like most other previous models. This allows to understand and later possibly manage different nuances of customer’s expectation as well as pain points during the interactions with the company, customer journey management is only a part of ecommerce analytics, you can watch the customers journey with the analytical data provided by your customer base and therefore provide a more personalized relationship with each customer.
Customer journey management traces its roots from service blueprint techniques, a visual representation of service delivery processes popularised in the early 2000s. Customer journey mapping also takes inspiration from channel chain models developed to track cross-channel interaction of customers and the organisation, an important notion in today’s online world. This model attempts to illustrate a customer’s progression from pre-purchase to post-purchase stage from a purchase funnel point of view. However, customer journey management needs to go beyond these two models in order to incorporate customer’s emotional motivation behind a purchase/interaction decision based on past experiences.
Technology in CJM
In today’s world, no new innovation goes without strong technological involvement and implications. Customer’s decision journey has been heavily impacted in recent times by the ubiquity of big data, the Internet of Things (IOT), and advances in web coding and design. An average customer can spend hours online and off-line options for researching and buying new products and services, all from the comfort of their portable device. The new marketplace never sleeps, never tires, and never stops advertising. The biggest challenge for companies in the online world is that tools and standards change faster than their internal reaction time. For example, think of a company that has developed expertise in search marketing after years of training and building its internal team; and then Sundar Pichai shows the world how Google Duplex, its ground-breaking AI assistant software, can make decisions and execute them for their owners. Imagine, a customer saying: “Okay Google, book a nice romantic dinner for me and my wife tonight”. Google assistant immediately chooses and books the restaurant based on the user’s preferences and habits. Now how would you, a digital marketing manager for a restaurant chain, manage this customer interaction? Such curveballs of technology is being thrown at businesses every now and then in the recent years.
Let’s take a look at an imaginary customer journey in today’s world. Imagine that a couple has just moved in together and is now thinking of purchasing a new washing machine. Akash and Ayesha start their journey by visiting several reputed retailers’ websites. At one store’s site, they identify three models they are interested in and save them to a “wish list.” Because space in their rented house is scarce and also because it’s their first big purchase-they decide they need to see the products in person.
Under an optimized cross-channel experience, the couple could find the nearest physical outlet on the retailer’s website, get directions using Google Maps, and take an Uber to view the desired products. Even before they walk through the doors, a transmitter mounted at the retailer’s entrance identifies Akash and Ayesha and sends a push alert to their cell phones welcoming them and providing them with personalized offers and recommendations based on their history with the store. In this case, they receive quick links to the wish list they created, as well as updated specs and prices for the washing machine that they had shown interest in (captured through cookies and their click trails on the store’s website). Additionally, they receive notification of a discount offer-“25 percent off on products of selected brands, today only”-that applies to two of the items they had added to their wish list.
When they tap on the wish list, the app provides a store map directing them to the appliances section and a “consult” button to speak with a store representative. They meet with the salesperson, ask some questions, take some measurements, and close in on a particular model and brand of washing machine. Because the store employs sophisticated tagging technologies, information about their chosen product has automatically been synced with other applications on the couple’s mobile phones-they can scan reviews using their Consumer Reports app, text their parents for advice, ask Facebook friends to weigh in on the purchase, compare the retailer’s prices against others, and even share a story on Instagram/snapchat. Akash and Ayesha can also take advantage of a “virtual designer” function on the retailer’s mobile app that, with the entry of just a few key pieces of information about room size and decor, allows them to preview how the washer and dryer might look in their home.
All the factors are favorable, so the couple decides to take advantage of the 15 percent offer and buy the appliance. They use Akash’s “smartwatch” to authenticate payment. They walk out of the store with a date and time for delivery. Two days later, on the designated day, they receive confirmation that a truck is in their area and that they will be texted within a half hour of arrival time-no need to cancel other plans just to wait for the product to arrive. Three weeks after that, the couple gets a message from the retailer with offers for other appliances and home-improvement services tailored toward first-year home owners; and the cycle begins again.
That, ladies and gentleman, is what a standard purchase journey looks like in 2018 (I admit some of these are still a few years away for Bangladesh, but that is mostly for regulatory barriers and lack of internet penetration).
Managing Customer Journeys
According to a recent research by McKinsey, two-thirds of the purchase decisions customers make are informed by the quality of their experiences all along their journey, not the product quality or price as preached by traditional marketing texts. Managing customer journeys is a tricky business for any organisation. The main challenge is that there are so many touchpoints that the organisation doesn’t control or even have any idea about. MESH, a London-based “experience” agency, is one of the pioneers in tracking and capturing customers’ interaction with the brand throughout different channels, most beyond the organization’s control.
This has opened doors for many new insights and opportunities. Some guiding principles according to their research and experience include:
• Brands need to take responsibility of all customer touchpoints, even those beyond their control like social media or third-party retailers.
• The new key metric for marketers is share of experience, not share of voice.
• Treating customer experience as a journey where the destination is not sales or profit, rather fulfilling the goals of customers.
Keeping in line with these principles, some academics and practitioners have developed a new metric called EXQ to measure customer experience across different channels. It is a multiple-item scale to quantitatively measure service experience delivered to customers. It explains and measures customer experience from four criteria: product experience, outcome focus, moments-of-truth, and peace-of-mind. A visual summary of the EXQ model is:
To keep up with rapid technology cycles and improve their cross channel marketing efforts, companies need to take embrace the speed that digitization brings and focus on capabilities that are essential to it. A 3-step process, as suggested by McKinsey looks like this:
Discover: Companies need to apply advanced analytics to the huge amount of structured and unstructured data at their disposal to gain a 360-degree view of the customers. Their engagement strategies should be based on an empirical analysis of customers’ recent behaviours and past experiences with the company, as well as the signals embedded in customers’ mobile or social-media data.
Design: Consumers now have much more control over where they will focus their attention, so companies need to craft a compelling customer experience in which all interactions are expressly tailored to a customer’s stage in his or her journey with the organisation.
Deliver: Execution excellence is the cornerstone of any business success. This, in the digital world, requires agile teams of experts in analytics and information technologies, marketing, and experience design. These cross-functional teams need strong collaborative and communication skills and a relentless commitment to iterative testing, learning, and scaling-at a pace that many companies may find challenging.
However, managing customer experience is not all about technology and digitization. There is a strong need for old-school management approach also. The whole process is divided into three steps:
• Defining the customer journeys crucial to the organisation
• Analysing the journeys for insights
• Finally continuously working on improving the journeys.
These three steps are leveraged by three organisational aspects that bind the whole process together as one coherent system. These are:
Skills: There are many different skills that impact successful management of customer journeys. A research across eight top UK firms reveal three key skillsets that every employee involved with customer journey management needs to possess. These are:
Internal processes: Having robust formalised processes is essential to manage the vast variety of tasks across multiple divisions involved in customer journey management. Having internal service level agreements (SLA) for every step makes sure everyone knows when to expect what and how to be prepared for it. However, one should be careful to ensure that customers see the entire process as one synchronised orchestra, not a gauntlet of individual steps that they have to go through every time they need to interact with the company.
Organisational structure: Having the right organisational structure is also quite valuable in this endeavour. Every organisation has its own structure that suits it best. However, having a centralised team of customer experience/journey management and also having one key individual from each department acting as CEx champion have been successful in a number of organisations. Finally, top management buy-in is critical for this, like any other task in an organisation.
So based on the entire discussion, a simple process model for managing customer journeys would look like this:
Customer journey management is a continuous and rapidly changing phenomenon for every organisation, regardless of which industry it operates in. In the age of experience economy, no organisation can afford to ignore it nor can they leave it to traditional management approaches to manage it. A conscious and robust effort at customer journey management will define who takes the lead in this extremely competitive global marketplace of twenty-first century.
References
- Dubberly, H. and Evenson, S. (2008). The Experience Cycle. [online] Dubberly.com. Available at: http://www.dubberly.com/articles/interactions-the-experience-cycle.html [Accessed 25 Apr. 2018].
- Følstad, A. and Kvale, K. (2018). Customer journeys: a systematic literature review. Journal of Service Theory and Practice, 28(2), pp.196-227.
- Lemon, K. and Verhoef, P. (2016). Understanding Customer Experience throughout the Customer Journey. Journal of Marketing, 80(6), pp.69-96.
- Phil Klaus, P. and Maklan, S. (2012). EXQ: a multiple?item scale for assessing service experience. Journal of Service Management, 23(1), pp.5-33.
- Van Bommel, E., Edelman, D. & Ungerman, K. (2014). Digitizing the consumer decision journey. Available from: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/digitizing-the-consumer-decision-journey?cid=soc-web (Accessed: 1 July 2018).
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