At the core of every successful business is a strong focus on customer experience. But in order to focus on customers, you have to hear firsthand what they think, feel, do, and say during their interactions with your company. Too often companies rely on their internal hypotheses about what customers want. But these are almost always flawed, because they’re tainted by organizational biases. Learn below how to capture the voice of the customer and use it to build empathy and drive change within your organization. Heart of the Customer helps you employ innovative tools, best practices methodology, and industry-leading analytics.
I wrote last week about the importance of video in sharing your customers’ experience (Video Interviews=CX Impact).
A major limitation of working with video is the task of managing all of that content. Historically, our process for working with video involved:
I received a call from a CX leader wanting to drive action in her program. I discussed how we use the voice of the customer to create an organizational drive to act, and she stopped me to say “We don’t need more voice of the customer. We know what customers want.” I asked her what Voice of the Customer (VoC) she had, and she referenced how her executives regularly talk with customers. But nobody else does. So, they “know” what customers want.
Note: We’re celebrating the upcoming launch of our new book, “How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer? Using Customer Journey Mapping to Drive Customer-Focused Change,” by Mapper-In-Chief, Jim Tincher and B2B Practice Lead, Nicole Newton. In the book, we introduce five journey mapping questions to answer as you launch your customer journey mapping effort.
Three weeks ago, Jim walked through “What’s the Business Problem or Opportunity?,” two weeks ago Nicole introduced the topic of “What is the Right Journey?” and last week Jim wrote about “Who’s the Right Customer?”
Interested in the five journey mapping questions? Watch the intro to our youtube series on the topic here.
Once you’ve defined the customer and the journey you would like to map, you will need to select the best approach to collect information about the experience.
At Heart of the Customer, we’re pleased to introduce our forthcoming book on journey mapping best practices!
Journey mapping opens up extraordinary avenues for business growth, but only when done wisely and well. Through insight from CX pros, extensive research, and real-world case studies, you can learn the best way to capture your customers’ experiences to drive action that gets results, boosting loyalty, satisfaction, and your bottom line.
As 2018 wrapped up, we finished mapping three very different B2B journeys – healthcare, manufacturing, and distribution. We found one major consistency: customers in all three reported recent backorder issues.
The customers were all businesses, but that’s where their similarities ended. Some were mom and pop retail storefronts; others were global manufacturers whose names you would immediately recognize, but their stories were similar:
In preparation for the upcoming Customer Contact Week, CCW shared their special report on journey mapping with me. Given our focus and expertise on journey mapping, I’m commonly asked to review these types of reports. Unlike most, however, CCW’s special report truly gets to the heart of the matter – journey mapping is not about creating a map; it’s about driving customer-focused change in your organization.
We’re early in Customer Experience (CX) capability development, and I absolutely love it! We’re discovering the best practices that our successors will take for granted; “of course that’s how you do it.”
Unfortunately, being in this early stage means that some “best practices” aren’t. Some actually hinder the goal of improved CX – to create loyal customers who love your brand and come back time and again.
One “best practice” that can create a terrible customer experience is paying employees to achieve good NPS, or Customer Satisfaction, scores. This needs to stop.
Last week I wrote about the Gartner CX Pyramid, an interesting maturity model. This week I’ll go into how to use journey mapping best practices to move up the model based on Gartner’s description of the model on their public website.
Selecting the right journey mapping approach requires you to understand where you are on the model and where you aspire to be. An inaccurate assessment will create waste; attempting to create a Proactive-level approach with only a Communication-level infrastructure will be expensive and ultimately frustrate customers instead of creating loyalty. Similarly, using a lower-level approach won’t have sufficient impact with higher-level design capabilities. Journey mapping doesn’t exist in a vacuum – it requires enough staffing and leadership to implement the changes that come out of it. Read more
There are a ton of journey mapping tools out there. I’m most familiar with Touchpoint Dashboard, but I’ve had demos from many others. They all excel at certain components of journey mapping, but they don’t (and probably can’t) address some of the largest problems.
That’s because the biggest reasons journey maps fail have nothing to do with digital problems; they’re analog. As we’ll discuss tomorrow, the biggest problem in journey mapping is that it’s done in silos. Small teams are created to do journey mapping. Those small teams intimately learn the customer experience, but because they don’t control the critical touch points, the effort fails to drive change.
Most journey mapping projects fail to drive change. That’s what we discovered when we surveyed practitioners who have conducted such projects (learn more about this survey in our white paper, “Driving Change Through Journey Maps”).
One leading success factor is selecting the right journey to map, and it’s the first place that problems occur because it requires trade-offs. Do you want an end-to-end map or one of a specific sub-journey?
An end-to-end map is interesting. Seeing the customers’ journey from beginning to end helps us to understand where the points of friction are and helps prioritize places where issues need to be fixed. Unfortunately, that end-to-end view isn’t always the best way to improve the customer experience.
What’s in a Name? Your Ability to Please Your CustomersOctober 15, 2020 - 6:00 am
CX Day Topic: How to Become a Trusted AdvisorOctober 6, 2020 - 7:50 am
Culture Is the Cart, Change Is the HorseOctober 3, 2020 - 7:00 am
Don’t Just Drive CX Success, Sustain ItSeptember 24, 2020 - 6:00 am
Propel CX Momentum With Quick WinsSeptember 18, 2020 - 6:00 am
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