The customer landscape has changed incredibly over the past decade to become a dynamic and demanding world. Companies who want to be successful need to keep up in order to survive and hold their customers’ loyalty.
As many as three-quarters of customers expect to get service instantly or within five minutes of making contact online. Understandably, just as many want the customer experience to be uncomplicated. Simple is always best.
But, needless to say, brands often struggle to achieve this. A major barrier to succeeding in this space is their understanding where the customer is on their journey.
To gain clarity on this aspect of the customer journey, brands need to focus on getting the right data, and subsequently, ensuring that its exchanged at the right point so as to use it efficiently and strategically to connect different touchpoints. Thereby, identifying and clarifying their customer journeys.
Customer success is about making the journey as human as possible as that defines the very best customer experience. Regardless of how a someone was inspired to visit a website, the website and the experience it offers needs to be relevant and responsive to what they’re looking for.
How can you make the journey simple?
As with many things, simplifying something is often one of the biggest challenges. In terms of the customer journey, simplification relies on looking at the whole end-to-end experience and, most crucially, viewing it from the customer’s perspective.
Regardless of what processes make sense from your business’s perspective, if it makes life harder for your valued customers, it’s not worth it. It will have a negative impact on not just the customer journey, but also your bottom line.
It is a common occurrence, but many companies still focus on individual customer touchpoints. A touchpoint can be sales agents, billing or service calls from the call centre, basically any individual transactions where customers interact with segments of the business and its offerings.
A superior customer journey, however, is a progression of touchpoints with a distinct start and end. They include a multitude of events that happen before, during, and after the experience of a product or service. Journeys can be long, reaching across multiple channels and touchpoints, lasting days or even weeks.
Related content: Download our free customer journey map template
How to focus on the journey
It’s about making the experience as cohesive as possible, as McKinsey&Company aptly writes: customers “experience companies through end to end experiences and not individual touchpoints”. These experiences can be things such as resolving a problem, changing an account or the onboarding process as a whole. Interestingly, McKinsey also found that individual touchpoints may perform well even though the customer’s overall journey is poor. Something to keep in mind, when designing (or redesigning) your CX.
Learn more about customer experience strategies for businesses wanting to be customer-led and grow their revenue, get our CEO Guide here:
