Annette Franz, CCXPFounder / CEO, CX Journey Inc

Connected Customers. Connected Journeys. Connected Data.

Your customers expect seamless, consistent, and personalized experiences across various channels and touchpoints. You must know their preferences and expectations and design an experience accordingly. In order to do that, you’ve got to have a complete view of the customer journey, as well as data-driven insights, to deliver on their expectations.

How do we understand customers and meet their expectations?

Let’s begin with this concept: journeys not touchpoints.

This is the mantra for customer experience success. But what does it mean? It means that, while it’s important to look at the individual steps and touchpoints, moments of truth, and channels of the experience, it’s more important to remember the whole journey, the entire experience that the customer has with your brand as he’s trying to do whatever it is he’s trying to do. Focusing on the entire journey affords you the ability to design and deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Why is this concept important?

Because journeys are how customers think; touchpoints are how businesses think. The customer doesn’t just think about the brand as a website or a phone call. When customers interact, they think about all of the steps that it will take to buy something or to solve a problem. And there are multiple touchpoints and steps in that experience that all need to be tied together to create a seamless journey.

CONNECTED CUSTOMERS, CONNECTED DATA, CONNECTED JOURNEYS

CONNECTED CUSTOMERS, CONNECTED DATA, CONNECTED JOURNEYS

Let’s use the customer service experience as an example. That journey begins when the customer has an issue and starts looking for answers. She might go to the website to find answers, then engage with the chatbot because she couldn’t find what she was looking for, and then ultimately call customer service for help. Each one of those (website, chatbot, customer service rep) is a touchpoint. String them all together, plus incorporate all of the other steps and channels and touchpoints in between, all the way through until her problem is solved, and now you’re talking about the journey.

Focusing on touchpoints reinforces organizational silos, which are painful for employees, making them painful for customers, too. There is no seamless and consistent experience for the customer if brands design for each individual touchpoint. The touchpoints are all steps along the same journey, so brands must view them in a connected way and design accordingly.

In order to get a full picture of what the journey looks like and to highlight where those siloes impact the customer experience, you’ll need to create a customer journey map. A journey map is a visualization of the steps that your customers take as they interact or transact with your brand. It captures a timeline of what customers are doing, thinking, and feeling along that journey and tells the story of their experience. One important thing to know about creating journey maps is that they must be done with customers! There’s no better way to understand their experience than to have them show and tell you what it is. (Note: At the end of this eBook, you’ll find a template to use to create your own journey maps – with your customers.)

Creating the map is not enough. Journey mapping is both a tool and a process. The next step in the process after the map is created is to enhance it and bring it to life with data.

CONNECTED CUSTOMERS, CONNECTED DATA, CONNECTED JOURNEY

There are many reasons to incorporate data into your maps, but some of the actionable ones are to:

Identify key moments of truth

Clarify high points and pain points for the customer

Identify where to simplify and personalize the experience

Understand where channel optimization needs to occur, and

Identify where communications can be more timely, relevant, and consistent

There are various types of data that can be incorporated into the map – including customer feedback, emotions, and expectations, as well as operational metrics and other business data. These will help you understand where the experience is going well and where there are gaps.

The rubber really hits the road when it’s time to design and deliver the new future-state experience. Given that understanding the customer is the first step in designing a better experience, the aforementioned data will be quite useful but so will customer data such as past and real-time behavioral, interaction, and transaction data; location data; and more. Integrating this data into the customer journey at the right place – touchpoints and channels – and time will ensure that your customers get the personalized experience they desire. Never before has the phrase “right data to the right people at the right time” been more relevant.

Data is at the heart of designing and delivering a great customer experience.

-Annette Franz

CONNECTED CUSTOMERS, CONNECTED DATA, CONNECTED JOURNEY

Customers have changed.

Customer behaviors have changed.

Customer expectations have changed.

They no longer say, “Know me.” Now they say, “Hear me. Know me. Understand me. Show me.” And “show me” translates to a lot of different things, like relevance, timeliness, and context, which can come in the form of location and proximity, channel, time of day, life events, product category, previous brand interactions, why a customer is buying, and more. Having data that allows you to hear/know/understand/show means that you will more effectively and efficiently engage with your customers.

The more you have the right customer data - holistic and accessible to be used at the right time - the better the experience will be for your customers. But it’s not just enough to have the consolidated data, you need to also have a connected data platform to feed consistent data to your CX building blocks.

Toolssuch as data platforms,

journey analytics, and predictive and

prescriptive analytics to understand, learn, adapt, and power all customer

touchpoints

Technologysuch as geofencing,

facial recognition, and biometric sensors to use

and collect more data

Peoplelike business analyst,

data scientist, and others across business and IT

organization to apply the data in a relevant and contextualized way

CONNECTED CUSTOMERS, CONNECTED DATA, CONNECTED JOURNEY

Data is the driving force, but there are hindrances and obstacles to this driving force, including organizational silos; siloed or disconnected data; data quality, accuracy, and consistency; lack of tools and technology; and, importantly, lack of customer understanding. And even if these obstacles are not in place, the real kicker is often speed, timeliness, and the ability to glean insights fast enough to be able to deliver the right experience in real-time. Using journey maps to understand the customer and her experience and to design better future experiences helps to break down or connect silos by helping every department (department often equates to touchpoint) see how the touchpoints connect to create the end-to-end experience. This becomes a driver for data sharing and for connecting customer data.

Ensuring that you’ve got connected data – customer data from cross-functional and cross-channel interactions that is centralized to create a single view of the customer – is critical to delivering a connected, seamless, and consistent experience. Overlaying this data with your journey map and ensuring it gets used at the right time to deliver the right experience for your customers is key.

Here are a few examples of how connected data across the customer journey helps to deliver a better experience for customers.

Localized experience: Bring together various data sources, including customer preferences, location, and regional preferences, to design and deliver an experience that is relevant to customers in a particular city or area. For example, customers in a certain area prefer soft drinks, while those in another area have a greater propensity to buy flavored sparkling water.

Manage demand and supply: Combine the localized experience with weather data, and you can serve up relevant offers and promotions on hot summer days. This also helps to accurately manage demand and supply for the area, ensuring that the drink of choice is on the shelf when consumers want it.

Relevant marketing: Imagine a customer lost his luggage and is on the phone working with the airline’s customer service agent to locate it. If the customer receives an email or a notification for an upsell offer for another trip, your airline will appear out of touch with the customer and his current plight. Or a customer purchases a particular product and gets an upsell offer for the same product when she visits the site the next day.

Relationship context: Know the difference between the buyer and the user in the household. A customer buys a gift for his wife online. She takes it to the store to exchange it for a different size. Combining the two transactions with past purchase history can help you discover the relationship between these two individuals and identify buyer versus user. Future marketing efforts can be targeted at the wife.

It goes without saying, but it’s still worthy to note, the balance between personalization and the ultimate experience rests on how well businesses can respect customer preferences, data privacy, security concerns, and the creepiness factor. Customers are willing to provide data and information to enjoy a better experience, but brands must be prepared to protect and secure personally identifiable information (PII) – and to tell their customers how they are doing that. In addition, given the hyper-connected nature of the Internet of Things (IoT), a clear source of customer behavioral data, data security is always a concern that must be top of mind for the brand.

In the end, “journeys not touchpoints” means that you are:

building relationships with customers, not just focusing on single touchpoint or transaction;

being proactive, not reactive, in experience design, which gives you a competitive advantage; and

designing and delivering a seamless and consistent end-to-end experience because you’ve infused connected data into connected journeys – journeys that account for all of the touchpoints customers engage with during a single transaction, whether that’s making a purchase, calling support, or opening an account. Brands that embrace “journeys not touchpoints” and put data at the heart of designing and delivering a great experience will be the providers of choice, as customers recognize and appreciate that brands care enough to hear them, understand them, know them, and, ultimately, show them.

CONNECTED CUSTOMERS, CONNECTED DATA, CONNECTED JOURNEY

Instructions for using the journey mapping template:

• Define the persona for which you’ll map• Define the scope of the map, e.g., the purchase experience• Gather customers who match the persona in a room

(in person or virtual)• Ask customers to:

° bring artifacts (e.g., pictures, videos, invoices) to help highlight aspects of the experience

° outline the steps they took to complete the experience (doing)

° describe their needs at each step (thinking) and how each step made them feel (feeling)

° document the people (people), systems, or documents (systems, tools, documents) interacted with during the experience

° capture the channel (channel) at which each step took place

° identify any outside influences (environmental factors) on the experience, e.g., weather conditions, regulations, economic factors, etc.

° identify how long each step took (timeline)

° vote on the high points and pain points, i.e., the best of the best and the worst of the worst

• Once the map is complete, you add owners to each step of the process to ensure that the pain points are acted on and identify known leakage points in the experience

• For more details on the journey mapping process, take a look at our webinar, “How and Where Data Can Bring Customer Journey Maps to Life”.

CONNECTED CUSTOMERS, CONNECTED DATA, CONNECTED JOURNEY

JOURNEY MAP TEMPLATE

Timeline

Channel

Systems, Tools, Documents

People

Environmental Factors

Feeling

Thinking

Doing

Step Owner

Known Leakage Points

©2020 CX Journey Inc. All Rights Reserved.

©2020 CX Journey Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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ABOUT AUTHOR

With almost 30 years in the customer experience profession, Annette Franz, CCXP is founder and CEO of CX Journey Inc. She is an internationally recognized customer experience thought leader, coach, keynote speaker, and author of Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the “Customer” in Customer Experience (and at the Heart of Your Business). She is also the 2020 CXPA Board Chair and a Certified Customer Experience Professional.

Annette Franz, CCXP

Founder / CEO,CX Journey Inc