It’s no secret that customer onboarding is one of the most crucial (and oftentimes challenging) stages in a customer’s journey with your brand. Indeed, the onboarding process usually ends up setting the tone for their subsequent interactions with your employees, their perception of your messaging, and even their product experience (PX). These and other variables make a well-designed onboarding experience of utmost importance to organisations and their customer experience (CX) initiatives.
Today’s conversation briefly touches on how your organisation can ensure that its onboarding experience isn’t just up to par, but built to ensure bold, human, and dynamic relationships with your customers. There are several reasons a lot of brands have mediocre or subpar customer onboarding; one of the biggest is because they don’t design their onboarding surveys with the end in mind.
What Is Designing with the End in Mind?
One of the most commonly held beliefs in the customer experience world is that a CX programme that gathers incoming data is a CX programme that’s good enough. This isn’t the case. Your initiative should be more than a metaphorical trawler net for data, especially if you want to fundamentally improve your customer onboarding processes. This is especially true for onboarding surveys.
Rather than aiming to collect data and then attempt to mine insights after the fact, brands should design their onboarding surveys with the end goal in mind before collecting any feedback from new or prospective customers. This approach may seem a bit unorthodox, but I promise it will save you time, resources, and customers. Designing with the end in mind will also make it much simpler to actually improve opportunity areas, not just identify them.
How Can Brands Design with the End in Mind?
There are a few best practices to bear in mind when designing (or redesigning) your customer experience surveys with the end in mind. Additionally, remember that these practices don’t have to apply solely to your surveys; you can aim them toward any facet of your experience programme and any goal that you need it to achieve.
First, take a hard look at your existing onboarding survey; evaluate what your existing customers have said it accomplished well and where it could’ve been better. Gather similar feedback from customer-facing and CX teams as needed. Identifying factors like these before you deploy your survey will give it (and indeed your wider programme) a proverbial north star, which will help you decide which audience segments and channels to devote your CX resources to.
Additionally, once you’ve identified the data you need your survey to collect, spell your related onboarding improvement goals out in concrete, quantifiable terms. Defining your goals with numbers will help you identify improvements much more precisely, and will also give you something tangible to present to the boardroom when you move to secure additional funding. A lot of programmes get stuck in defining their objectives abstractly, which can make it difficult to ascertain whether any improvements were actually made. This approach nullifies that problem.
Click here to learn how Virgin Money was able to improve their customer onboarding experience.
Meaningful Experience Improvement
Designing with the end in mind is not a simple task for any element of a CX initiative. It’s an approach that demands a great deal of time and discipline at the start of the process, followed by continuous dedication as you begin to collect insights. However, if your organisation is ready to invest that effort, you’ll begin to see much more promising results from your surveys than if you simply turn your listening posts on and dredge your data lake for anything potentially useful. Designing with the end in mind saves you and your team a great deal of both time and effort down the line.
Why? Because this approach will grant you only the most pertinent insights and feedback, enabling you to create meaningful Experience Improvement (XI).
Click here to read my full-length point of view article on what else your organisation can do to create consistent, successful, and peerless customer onboarding experiences. I present a few other best practices I’ve observed (and executed) in my many years within this space, and know that they will help you on your journey to improved customer onboarding.
A customer journey map is a diagram of all the places customers come into contact with your brand, online or off. Each of these touchpoints influences the customer, and by analyzing customer behavior, feelings, and motivations around each touchpoint, you can begin to identify opportunities to establish more positive relationships by giving customers what they need at any given stage of their journey.
The goal of a customer journey map is to gain a deeper understanding of your customer, how they interact with your brand, and how each interaction affects your relationship. It’s also a way to ensure that the brand experience remains consistent for each customer across touchpoints.
“With the number of touchpoints a customer has with a brand increasing with the proliferation of technologies and channels, the need to create a consistent experience is critically important.” – McKinsey & Company
But the big picture goal is why there is so much buzz around customer journey maps now:
A Customer journey map can move you towards more conversions, greater customer loyalty, and improved customer experience from end to end (or from end to forever, if you are subscription-based and there’s no bottom to your sales funnel).
But a customer journey map can be complicated to create, and the results can be difficult to track and interpret from end to end. Many businesses are tempted to ignore it altogether in favor of lower-hanging fruit to increase conversions.
However, that hesitancy to use customer journey maps is quickly disappearing as more companies are seeing the results from properly customer journey mapping.
And, if your company is struggling with the question: “Why aren’t customers completing (or repeating) purchases?” – there is no better time to create a customer journey map that will lead you to that answer.
Customer Cartography: Where to Begin on a Customer Journey Map
“We found that a company’s performance on journeys is 35 percent more predictive of customer satisfaction and 32 percent more predictive of customer churn than performance on individual touchpoints. Since a customer journey often touches different parts of the organization, companies need to rewire themselves to create teams that are responsible for the end-to-end customer journey across functions.” – McKinsey & Company
What’s Included in the Customer Journey Map?
Before getting started on a customer journey map with the steps below, here’s an overview of some of the key components that make up the map. Be sure to weave these key components into your customer journey mapping process.
The Buying Process: The customer buying process includes milestones from start to end with their purchasing journey. You’ll want to draft the path you intend the customer to take by listing the buying process stages.
User Actions: This explains in detail what a customer may do before initiating a transaction such as seeing the ad of the product and hearing about it from their social circle.
Emotions: Adding emotions into the process helps to understand how the customer feels when they’re searching for solutions to solve their pain points.
Pain Points: This element gives insights into where a customer might encounter a negative experience and helps us understand why.
Solutions: This last part of the customer journey map is for your team to brainstorm where to improve based on the customer journey.
Gather Your Customer Journey Map Cross-Functional Team
As customers go through the various stages in the sales funnel, they cross departments from marketing to sales to product to customer success and customer service.
So it only makes sense that, when choosing your team for your customer journey mapping project, you have a representative from each of these departments involved. Having a cross-departmental team is vital to gaining the kind of understanding that is the whole point of the customer journey management exercise.
“When a manager takes the lead to form a cohesive, customer-centric, interdepartmental team, it not only facilitates learning and accountability throughout the whole company, it can even change company culture for the better.” – Jessica Pfeifer, VP & General Manager, InMoment.
Defining Customer Segments for a Customer Journey Map
Once your team is assembled, ask marketing to list out each key customer segment for the customer journey map.
It’s extremely likely that each customer segment’s journey will be different. They’re likely finding you, and communicating with you, in different ways depending on demographic and psychographic variables.
That means, unless you only have one ideal customer persona, that you’ll actually be creating several customer journey maps, one for each segment.
Plotting Touchpoints for a Customer Journey Map
Once you have your customer journey map segments identified, it’s time to plot out your touchpoints for each one. How and when does your customer interact with your brand, your product, your team?
You can decide whether you will tackle the pre-acquisition journey, post-acquisition journey, or the whole customer journey map.
With touchpoints, there are the ones you have control over, and the ones you don’t. There are the ones you can track easily, and those you can’t. If your company advertises via billboard, for example, that can be hard to track, even if you survey customers.
Of the ones you can control and track, online touchpoints are the easiest. So start there. Ask your marketing team members to fill you in on what the top of the funnel looks like, what links are bringing people to your website, and how those people first heard of you. In the post-acquisition phase, Customer Success and Support own certain customer touchpoints, and are likely already gathering feedback about them from customers. These touchpoints may include the end of the onboarding cycle in SaaS, order delivery in ecommerce, and customer support interaction. The Product team may articulate customer journey map points that are driven by behavior, such as feature adoption in SaaS or a purchase threshold in e-commerce.
And, if the team doesn’t know already, don’t be afraid to ask the customers themselves – every step of this customer journey map should be grounded in real customer data. At the same time, don’t let the exercise become overwhelming. You and your team may already have an intuitive sense of the customer journey map. Get something documented and work to refine it over time.
Gathering Customer Data for a Customer Journey Map
You need more than touchpoints for your customer journey map. You need to know what’s happening at and around each touchpoint. You have to get inside the minds and hearts of the customers at every juncture to find out what they’re thinking, feeling, and needing to do.
Of these three, understanding customers’ emotions shouldn’t be given short shrift: 69% of consumers say that emotions count for over half their experiences. Consider adding emotions into your customer journey map.
Unless you have robust research from marketing and customer success departments already, you may want to gather all of this data, asking members of each segment – around every identified touchpoint – these questions:
Questions to Ask for a Customer Journey Map
What they’re thinking at that touchpoint
What they’re feeling at that touchpoint
What they need most at that touchpoint (use this as an indicator of buyer stage – awareness, research, choice reduction, purchase)
What their ultimate goal is (why are they here?)
What they do/did at that touchpoint (or use a session recording program to see exactly what they did, like hitting the “back” button when they land in the cart, etc.)
You may also need to conduct analytical research for a customer journey map, taking a deep dive into your website/product analytics to find what users are doing and where they might be experiencing difficulty.
And don’t discount the data your customers volunteer on social media and review sites. You can gather valuable anecdotal evidence for your customer journey map from a social media listening tool – as well as from the stories of your own customer success and customer service managers.
With this data, you can start to build a customer journey map for each segment persona, for each purchase stage, and each touchpoint, with an overlay for what they are thinking, feeling, wanting, doing, and most importantly, what they’re hoping to achieve.
The Customer Success Component of a Customer Journey Map
This is where we add Customer Success to the mix, ensuring that at each step, we have a crystal-clear understanding of each customer segment’s success milestones and ideal outcomes, so we can bridge any gaps between them.
Including customer success metrics, (particularly success milestones) in your customer journey map isn’t often. This is likely because customer journey mapping has been traditionally focused on the top end of the funnel – Acquisition, Decision, and Purchase phases.
But SaaS is different. The funnel doesn’t end with the purchase. The goal isn’t to sell once or twice, but to retain customers via subscription, which requires continually providing and increasing value.
SaaS businesses – you need to chart much more than any other industry and make each post-purchase touchpoint count towards getting your customers closer to their desired outcome.
And that focus turns touchpoints into stepping stones towards success milestones.
In practice, this means you’ll need to consider how touchpoints, especially after purchase, can be used to help your users make real, tangible progress.
Customer Journey Mapping Examples for SaaS, eCommerce, and Brick-and-Mortar Stores
There are so many ways to create a customer journey map, and it can be difficult to decide what has to be in, and what may be less important to you depending on your type of business and your goals. Here are a few customer journey mapping examples from different types of industries that are mapping their customer journeys effectively.
First, let’s look at two of the main ways you can organize your customer journey map data: Linear or chart.
Linear: Works best when customers have fewer options for how they interact with you, or when you want to create a customer journey map along a timeline.
Chart: Works best when you have touchpoints that meander in a nonlinear fashion.
Clearly, both types of charts can hold a lot of widely-varying information. And there are many more ways to create a customer journey map too, like with emotion-centered maps.
Whichever way you choose to create your customer journey map, be sure to include what the customer feels and needs at every touchpoint, as well as how you can improve the one and deliver the other.
Here are some more customer journey map examples by industry. Notice that no single map has everything.
Improving Customer Experience (CX): Start with a Simple Customer Journey Map
As you can see, there are many, many valid ways to approach a customer journey map. The customer journey map examples above reflect deep thinking and research — the result of intensive project work by these companies. Use them for inspiration. Don’t let them stop you and your team from drafting a simple journey flow to get the ball rolling.
By dedicating even an afternoon to a cross-functional knowledge-sharing session you will likely come away with:
a more robust understanding of how your customers interact with and “experience” your company.
a basic journey map
3-5 “low hanging fruit” opportunities for improvement
Your goal with all of this is to improve customer experience. Remember, there is a good reason for that. As Jake Sorofman, Research VP, Gartner says, “As competition and buyer empowerment compounds, customer experience itself is proving to be the only truly durable competitive advantage.”
B2B purchasing decisions are complex. They’re financial. They’re political. But more than anything—they’re unpredictable. While B2B firms have more systems in place than ever to predict sales outcomes, they’re still blindsided when prospects choose another vendor.
But it doesn’t have to be that way! To avoid this fate, it’s critical to have a process in place for exploring, analyzing, and improving the buyer experience—win or lose. You might have already guessed it, but I’m talking about buyer interviews.
Using the Right Listening Technique
There’s no one right way to collect feedback. It depends on the audience, the timing, the circumstances, and ultimately—what you’re trying to learn. Whether you’re sending SMS surveys, analyzing social reviews, or conducting phone interviews, it’s about using the right listening technique for the situation to get the best results.
Following the methodology below, our own customer experience (CX) program (Elevate) is successfully getting feedback from upwards of 90% of closed sales opportunities in our best months—and the insights are invaluable.
Here’s what we’re doing and why we think it is successful.
Building Human Connections
For our post-opportunity listening post, we’ve found that interviews are the most effective way to engage buyers. And the intelligence we glean from these “buyer interviews” is impactful across teams.
Interviews can either supplement or replace a post-sales survey. I’ve found that many buyers actually prefer spending 30 minutes on the phone with me rather than two-minutes completing a survey.
Also, the suggestion of a phone call lets the client know that we’re willing to take the time to listen—that we care, we want to learn, and we want to improve. It’s all about building that human connection, and it is a great way to get sticky with new clients and show your investment from the start.
Buyer Interviews Process
Now, I bet you’re wondering how we efficiently scale this largely manual process!
First, we conduct dozens of interviews each quarter. The open-ended nature of an interview allows us to ask all of the right questions and follow the conversation wherever the respondent takes it. And we use the robust insights to drive cross-functional action. Across all of our listening posts, I can confidently say buyer interviews have quickly become one of our most beloved data sources.
The Insights
Here are some of the things we’ve learned—and the teams that have benefited—by rolling out our buyer interview program:
Pricing (sales ops)
Roadmap Investments (product)
Messaging, Packaging, and Competitive (product marketing)
Demos (solution consultants)
Presentations (sales directors)
Renewal Strategy (client success)
At a regular cadence, our “Experience Improvement Board” looks at the emerging themes, chooses projects and specific actions, and assigns an executive owner. This owner then forms a “tiger team” to research and tackle the project—and reports on progress each month!
Time to Get Started!
If buyer interviews are not currently part of your post-opportunity strategy, they should be. They will not only increase your response rate, but will give you additional intelligence and insight into what your buyers expect from your company. It’s the most personal way to request feedback and build lasting relationships, win or lose.
I’m not done sharing the successes of our buyer interview program. In subsequent blogs, I will talk about some of the questions we ask during interviews, challenges you may face in your conversations (and how to overcome them), interview do’s and don’ts, how to build your “interview team,” and what sorts of insights you should specifically try to gain from interviews.
But in the meantime, if you have questions about launching or refining your own buyer interview program, I’d love to talk to you. I’m Josh Marans, Director Experience Improvement at InMoment, and you can find me on Linkedin.
When most folks think of friction, they probably think of middle school science class. But if you’re a customer experience professional, “friction” is probably a term you’ve heard whenever your teammates talk about reducing customer churn. Within that context, friction refers to points in the brand experience that can have a long-term impact on customers’ relationship with a business. Friction may even cause some customers to quit a brand altogether.
Why Is It Important to Reduce Friction in the Customer Journey?
Additionally, research by Carlson Marketing shows that U.S. companies lose 50% of their customers every five years. Multiply the amount of churning customers by the lifetime value (LTV) of the average customer at your organization and losing customers at this rate means losing millions of dollars!
Because of this, it’s essential that brands have an experience program in place that can detect friction, help experience professionals understand the problem(s) creating that friction, and correct them. The result is both a meaningfully improved experience and saved customer relationships. So, without further ado, let’s go over how your organization can ensure it’s eliminating friction across your customer journey.
How Can You Eliminate Friction in the Customer Journey?
#1: Understand The Moments That Matter
Like we said earlier, an important part of reducing friction is knowing about and understanding the moments that matter to customers. Brands can achieve this understanding by mapping out a few of their most important customer journeys. Learning about key touchpoints is one of the best ways to become aware of problems as they arise.
One of the most impactful methods to identify these moments and then reduce friction across your customer journey is InMoment’s Touchpoint Impact Mapping. Touchpoint Impact Mapping is a innovative way of understanding the moments that matter to customers. It is unique because it is based entirely on comment data drawn from customer feedback, ensuring a more accurate view of the customer’s memory of their experience. This creates an emotional picture of the journey that highlights what is most important to customers and also allows our clients to prioritize those moments that matter most to their customers.
Watch this video to hear how banking giant, Virgin Money, leveraged Touchpoint Impact Mapping to identify a key friction point and then improve its customer onboarding experience!
How Virgin Money Eliminates Friction in It’s Customer Journey
What’s more, once you’ve identified those high-impact moments, you can use this strategy to immediately begin solving those problems and expediently reduce journey friction. Understanding touchpoints and their drawbacks enables organizations to come up with solutions, implement them, and listen to see how they’re working. Experience practitioners can then point to those changes, and their improvements, when proving their program’s worth.
#2: Talk to Employees
Research has even shown that a highly engaged workforce increases profitability by 21%! So, getting your customers’ take on an experience is clearly important, but many brands, in their rush to do so, overlook chatting with their employees about customer journeys as well. Employees, especially frontline ones, can provide extremely powerful and eye-opening intel about your brand’s experience. How can brands access and leverage that?
The best way for brands to get their employees’ perspective is by letting them constantly submit feedback and ideas in real-time. Rather than relying on, say, an annual survey, organizations should instead utilize experience platforms that give employees a constant voice. This also further allows brands to learn about, and act upon, problems as they emerge in real-time instead of too far down the road for the customer’s liking.
Want to learn more about how employees can help you decrease friction in the customer journey and grow customer loyalty and value? Check out this infographic!
#3: Keeping Tabs on Your Customer Journey
That notion of being constantly aware of journey friction as it happens is at the heart of keeping it suppressed as much as possible. Surveys are important, but this dynamic is another reason why they’re insufficient for reducing journey friction by themselves—a constantly possible problem demands a constantly active solution. Organizations simply cannot achieve that level of awareness otherwise.
Instead of relying solely on direct surveys, brands can do this by combining survey listening with other sources of data, like your employees’ perspectives, and putting it against a backdrop of financial and operational information. This approach creates a 360-degree view of your customers and experience, an understanding that your organization can leverage to reduce friction, boost retention, and create a meaningfully improved experience.
Want to learn more about improving customer retention? We just published an entire eBook on the subject—click here to check it out!
A lot of companies and organizations have gotten a very specific idea of how experience programs and human expertise work into their collective minds these last 20 or so years. The impression is this: experience programs are fully autonomous solutions that can pretty much be set and forget. They can automatically gather data and use that information to solve your business challenges, build better relationships with customers, and help you achieve Experience Improvement (XI).
There’s a good reason this impression is so prevalent: it’s a pretty accurate description of a lot of the experience programs and vendors you’ll find out there. The catch, though, is that technology and data alone can’t actually address any of the factors I laid out in the preceding paragraph. There’s a gap between tech and outcomes that many vendors gloss over in their rush to provide reaction-based, purely DIY solutions, and that’s human expertise.
What follows are three reasons human expertise is vital to actually bridging that tech-outcome gap and creating Experience Improvement for your customers, employees, and marketplace:
Best Practices
Problems and Priorities
Marketplace Intel
Reason #1: Best Practices
When you boost your experience program with human expertise, you’ll have armed yourself with countless best technology practices. It’s true that technology has produced some extremely powerful tools, such as sentiment analysis, but you need human expertise and consultancy to help identify which sentiments are most relevant to your Experience Improvement goals.
In other words, even a tech engine needs a driver. Putting a consultant or thought leader in that seat will make a world of difference for your experience program’s effectiveness. Take time to consider which goals you need your experience program to help realize, design that program with the end in mind, and keep someone at the helm who can make sure your initiative doesn’t stray from the path.
Reason #2: Problems & Priorities
Another reason that fully autonomous experience solutions often fail the brands that use them is that they lack dynamism. They’re programmed with a specific set of parameters and will barge ahead even when problems arise or priorities shift. That’s another reason human expertise is invaluable in a CX setting; having someone handy who can identify problems when they arise or read new writing on the wall can feed that insight directly into your experience program, supercharging its effectiveness.
Even if some of the DIY experience tools out there allow users to tweak for factors like these, doing so without the aid of an experienced practitioner can still leave you open to mistakes. On the flip side, arming yourself with that expertise can make you aware of larger trends and deeper problems than a few cursory adjustments to program parameters can account for.
Reason #3: Marketplace Intel
There’s a market research element to human expertise that can help take your experience program (and your brand) to the very top of your vertical. Experience initiative success stems from a few places, like successfully closing the loop and implementing meaningful transformations, but it also comes from a deep knowledge of your brand’s marketplace landscape. This means understanding customer segments, knowing where to find unsolicited data, and identifying new and emerging trends.
A versatile and powerful Experience Improvement platform can eventually come to account for factors like these, but only when guided by human experience and insight. It takes that expertise to identify audience segments, unsolicited data sources, and more. These experts can then help pour that context and insight directly into your platform, allowing your experience team to furnish specifical, meaningful solutions to your business challenges. It’ll also enable you to do something no DIY program can do: create bold, human, and meaningful relationships with customers that will stand the tests of time and competition.
Creating Experiences, Not Just Numbers
How else can human expertise help shape Experience Improvement success, and how best can brands combine their tech with expertise to create better outcomes for customers, employees, and their marketplace position? To learn more, click here to read my point of view document. I go into greater detail on the nature of human expertise and how intersecting that with technology the right way will help you realize the goals outlined here.
Customer loyalty has become more elusive in the past few years. As customers seem to shop solely based on the best deal, it can be difficult to build customer loyalty in retail, which leaves many brands wondering if customer loyalty is even worth the effort.
However challenging it may be for retailers, developing a loyal customer base is essential to maintaining an active, healthy brand. A loyal customer is valuable to retailers in a multitude of ways. Many studies show that repeat customers are likely to purchase more frequently, spend more money, and pay a premium for a product. In addition to generating more income from their own purchases, loyal customers are more likely to refer new customers to the brand, furthering the cycle of customer retention.
As a retailer, how do you build these types of relationships with your customers? Read below for our five best tips.
5 Ways to Build Customer Loyalty in Retail
Step #1: Personal Experience
Your frontline staff play a large role in converting a customer from an occasional shopper to a brand advocate. Train your employees to go above and beyond to provide your customers with helpful, friendly, and knowledgeable service to create an experience your customers will remember. Work toward a culture of centered on employee engagement and provide your staff with regular training, feedback, and incentives to encourage consistently excellent performance. Simply put, investing in employee engagement saves you money.
Step #2: Store Experience
Is your retail store an inviting place for customers to spend their time? If you design your store to provide an appealing experience, customers will be more likely to visit your store as an activity or a destination. Your store should be clean, attractive, and easy to navigate. In addition to the physical design and layout of your store, pay close attention to your inventory. Customers expect stores to be well-stocked with high-quality merchandise.
Remember that retail purchases are intertwined with a shopper’s life, image, and identity. Your store experience and aesthetics should affirm to customers that your brand is a good fit with their lifestyle and personal identity.
Step #3: Price and Value
Retailers often mistakenly think that customers will only buy the cheapest product available, regardless of the brand or retailer. While this may be true in some markets, many consumers are willing to pay more if they feel the price matches the product’s quality. Price your products so that the perceived value is high. Sales, coupons, and promotions can also help customers feel like your brand offers a good value.
Many customers will pay slightly more to shop at a store that provides a better experience and that treats their employees well. As you improve your brand’s personal and store experience, your perceived value will increase.
Step #4: Marketing and Communication
Once you’ve fine-tuned your brand experience and product pricing, you can begin to promote customer loyalty through marketing campaigns. Your marketing and communication efforts should positively reflect your brand. As you plan your marketing strategy, prioritize brand voice and consistency across all of your channels (e.g. social media, email marketing, online advertising, and in-store promotions). If you have customers who enthusiastically promote your brand online, engage with them and encourage their behavior.
Again, consider that loyal customers will consider purchases from your brand as an extension of their personality and lifestyle. Use this to your advantage as you build customer relationships through your marketing campaigns.
Step #5: Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs are a great way to incentivize customers to visit your store more frequently. Discounts and promotions that are tied to a loyalty program can help customers feel that you value their business. The data generated by loyalty programs is also very valuable. When implemented correctly, you can use this data to help customers find products they’ve purchased in the past or return an item without the hassle of a receipt. On the retailer’s side, this data can also be used to learn more about customer purchasing habits and establish net promoter score. As always, use and protect customer data appropriately and with discretion.
Diversity and inclusion initiatives have become front and center for many organizations in recent years. It’s important for brands to create diverse and inclusive customer experiences (CX) and employee experiences (EX)—not ‘just’ because being more inclusive is the right thing to do, but also because organizations have a lot to gain from accommodating greater diversity in every experience they create.
Of course, an organization stating diversity and inclusion goals is a good start, but how can brands like yours translate such goals into tangible Experience Improvement (XI) strategies and tactics that create more inclusive customer experiences? There are many, many opportunities here, but the most important thing to do is to just get started.
So, here are three quick thoughts you should apply right now to create more inclusive employee and customer experiences.
3 Keys to Creating More Inclusive Customer Experiences
Key #1: Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mistakes
Key #2: Engage New and All Audiences
Key #3: Apply What You’ve Learned
Key #1: Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mistakes
It’s understandable for organizations to be intimidated by the prospect of making mistakes while attempting to accommodate and include new audiences. Such mistakes can quickly become viral via social media, review sites, and other tools, creating headaches both for brands and the customers (or employees) at the heart of such events.
Though this worry is certainly a valid concern, it’s better to accept that mistakes might be made and press forward with your diversity and inclusion efforts than to allow timidity to outright impede either. These are the growing pains of becoming more inclusive with your customer and employee experiences, and facing them head-on will also give your team an opportunity to consider how best to handle such mistakes and learn from them.
Experience shows that both customers and employees accept that mistakes inevitably occur and are a result of activity. Being passive is not an option when trying to create more inclusive customer experiences. Overcome the fear of making mistakes and concentrate on a transparent and authentic way to deal with them when they occur.
Key #2: Engage All Audiences
If you’re still concerned about how best to connect to audiences you haven’t consistently talked to before, this is the section for you. For many years now, the big idea behind CX and EX programs has been to simply gather as much feedback as possible from as many people as possible. However, before turning any listening posts on, you should sit down with your team and design (or reorient) your experience initiatives with your end goals in mind. You must ensure that you give all audiences you want to hear from the opportunity to provide feedback.
In this case, if your goal is to create more inclusive experiences, you should consider which audiences you need to reach out to and how to do so. This means doing some legwork to find out how those audiences communicate, what their preferences are, and bringing all of those insights to bear when meaningfully improving your experiences to accommodate diversity and inclusion.
Also, don’t forget: You need the right tool to collect feedback from all audiences as well as to disseminate that information to all members of your organization. Make sure you are using accessibility tools like screen readers, larger font sizes, higher contrasts, etc.
Key #3: Apply What You’ve Learned
You can and should apply the above mindset to any experience goal you have across the entirety of your business. Applying it here will give you the intelligence and landscape map you need to achieve Experience Improvement (XI) for new audiences.
However, intelligence and roadmaps are only half the battle; taking action is imperative to actually making your experiences more inclusive. The work is ceaseless and oftentimes difficult, but if your team is ready to continue making an effort, you can be assured that the audiences you need to reach will respond.
As you continue to take action on what those audiences tell you, you’ll be able to meaningfully transform your business and realize your goal of a more inclusive experience. Being more inclusive is an invaluable component of marketplace leadership, but it’s also what will set your organization apart from your competitors in your customers’ eyes. The result is a mutually beneficial, meaningfully improved experience that will demonstrate to all your organization’s commitment to diversity and inclusion as well as faster revenue growth and higher profitability.
Click here to learn more about the importance of diverse and inclusive experiences in my full-length point of view article. I take a closer look at the topics explored here and go over a few other best practices you might not have had the chance to read about elsewhere.
It’s a commonly held belief among many brands—and the customer experience (CX) vendors that partner with them—that all it takes to solve your business challenges and meet CX goals is to turn on as many listening posts as possible. The idea behind this approach is to gather a mountain of ‘big data’ and thus be armed with every possible piece of information about your customers, your employees, other audience segments, and all their preferences.
The truth, though, is that there’s a gap between data and business challenges that just having data isn’t enough to bridge. A lot of CX vendors and programs fail to account for this gap, and thus many of these initiatives fail to make a difference. The secret to making a difference? A principle called designing with the end in mind, and connecting your CX program to quantifiable goals before any listening posts are even activated. I’m going to take you through three such goals that will help your CX program be the best it can be. Those goals are:
CX Goal #1: Customer Retention
CX Goal #2: Cross-Selling/Upselling
CX Goal #3: Customer Acquisition
CX Goal #1: Customer Retention
Given how much more expensive it is to onboard new customers than to keep existing ones, customer retention is a goal that permeates most every department of most every organization. A lot of brands want to use their CX program to retain customers, but they usually end up gathering a mountain of data and then trying to manually carve insights about their existing audience out of it.
It turns out that using this approach means that you’re working backwards. Rather than try to gather actionable insights only after accruing data, it’s far better for brands to dedicate at least part of their program design phase to figuring out which goals they need to achieve for their customer base. Which audience segments do you need to listen to? What channels do they use? Building your program around these questions will end up saving not ‘just’ customers, but a great deal of time and effort on your part.
CX Goal #2: Cross-Selling/Upselling
Once you’ve established which audience segments and channels suit your business goals, you can dive a bit deeper by identifying cross-selling and upselling opportunities within your customer base. This work requires nuance, but you can use the same design-with-the-end-in-mind approach here as with retaining your customers to unveil new revenue sources without having to onboard new customers.
This goal ends up being something that a lot of brands overlook, but it should be a core driving ethos of your CX program. You should also make room within this goal for cross-shoppers and customers who transacted with you in the past but aren’t currently. With a well-designed CX program, the sky here is the limit.
CX Goal #3: Customer Acquisition
Acquiring new customers can be expensive, but everyone knows it’s a necessary goal to shoot for to sustain growth and market share. You can use the same audience segment and channel identification ethos here as with customer retention; the result will be the ability to find where new business lives and be there for it when your competitors can’t or won’t. In fact, researched properly, you can arm yourself with an idea of what these new customers will want before they themselves know!
Bridging The Gap
These three goals form a solid foundation for any customer experience program, and designing your program around them before activating your listening posts will enable you to actually bridge the gap between your big data and achieving Experience Improvement (XI). Knowing your audience and your marketplace landscape are integral parts of market experience (MX).
To learn more about how market experience shapes CX program goals and how best to get the lay of your marketplace landscape, click here to read my full-length PoV on using a combination of tech and market research to find and grow audience segments. Achieving an MX perspective takes time and effort, but the brands that master it are the masters of their verticals far more often than not.
Customer experience (CX) metrics are a CX program’s bread and butter. NPS, CSAT, and CES have historically been the main tools every program utilizes to have a systematic way of establishing a voice of customer (VoC) source and leveraging those findings to improve customer experiences. But it’s not easy—a CX metric score alone can’t create transformation.
CX metrics aren’t one-size-fits-all. Certain CX metrics are more fitting for specific industries—and even then your brand might not need to use the same metrics as your direct competitors. Case in point, there’s no one golden method to measuring CX metrics, which is actually why many businesses struggle to create a success framework.
In our decades of experience helping brands to build programs (and the success frameworks that accompany them), we’ve noticed there are a few common obstacles companies face. Here are the three most common CX questions we get all the time:
CX Metrics Question #1: What Metrics Can You Use to Determine Industry and Organizational Maturity?
Before you can answer this question for your company, there are three things you should answer first:
Are you measuring a customer experience—and is it satisfaction or NPS—or a metric that aligns with the goal you have?
What are you doing with it? How are the metrics of field services, retail, call-center, first-contact resolution, etc. used?
From an employee perspective, are you doing something beyond a basic employee engagement study? Or do you have an employee pulse metric by division, region, or queue?
There’s no one-size-fits-all metric that determines maturity—and should there be? Instead, you need to focus on where your company is on the journey toward your specific goals. Success, then, is determined by how close you are to achieving that goal, instead of a set of objective metrics that may not even relate to your business. Truly mature organizations are aligned on specific business goals and have metrics directly attached to those individual goals. They frequently check in on those metrics and take action to move the needle and tie that success back to their experience programs.
CX Metrics Question #2: How Can You Tie Metrics Directly to CX and VoC Programs Versus Other Internal and External Factors?
The important thing is to look at your organization and how they talk about success—and learning to speak that language. Are you a finance, operations, or retention-focused organization? And how are you integrating operational, technical, and financial data with customer survey data?
Organizations that are technically or engineering focused often look for an extreme amount of precision. But survey data doesn’t always lead to one answer—or the answer you expect. The real question is, “how do you pull information together and communicate that collectively?” As much as the mathematical connections are crucial, so are the practical ones.
Ultimately, metrics can be tied either statistically or practically, but the latter is much more realistic for a business. For example, the broader benefits when enabling an entire organization is hard to quantify but there could be specific benefits your program has contributed to make a project more successful. Maybe the insights your program provided can take accountability for 10% of the project’s effects. Then you can say, “it wasn’t all from our VoC or CX program but we get credit for that 10%.”
Want to learn about the 4 areas where we see CX practitioners tie their efforts to the bottom line most successfully? Check out this infographic!
CX Metrics Question #3: When It Comes to Survey Analysis, What’s the Best Practice to Analyze Which Attributes Are Affecting NPS?
Let’s say your organization leadership is focusing in on NPS—where you are, what drives it, and so on. So, you try structural equation modeling, key driver analysis, or heavy duty analytics. That approach is equatable to killing a mosquito with a sledgehammer. Instead, you want to break methodology down to core factors—using statistical analysis or text analytics—to see what themes come out and categorize them according to where your organization is.
Now, at an executive level, you might not want to communicate the “R-squared” of the modeling. Usually, executives just want answers to the questions, “what’s driving NPS?” and “what should I do with it?” Your job is to articulate the answers in a clear and simple way throughout the organization. That will drive your success from the top down. But of course, you should still have in-depth analyses prepared in your back pocket if you encounter someone who is statistically oriented.
Wrapping Things Up
You probably still have a bunch of questions of your own. Like, “what are the best practices to make sure you’re appropriately capturing feedback across the customer journey?” Or, “how do you focus on the experiences that make the biggest impact to the bottomline?”
If you’re looking for more resources and insight into CX metrics and ensuring your CX program delivers business value (ROI) to your organization, watch this webinar with third-party analyst firm, Forrester, to learn the answers.
E-commerce is one of the fastest growing industries of this decade. Thanks to COVID, digital roadmaps across industries have quickly accelerated. If you weren’t yet online, it didn’t take long for brands to adapt when brick and mortar businesses across Asia Pacific were forced to shut down in 2020 and 2021.
It’s not been easy for e-commerce brands. After a whirlwind of COVID-spurred digital transformation, rapid brand expansion, and supply chain woes, consumer expectations and their relationships with e-commerce brands have changed before our eyes. So what can these brands do to get ahead of customer expectations? The key is to dive into your customer data. And we’re here to help.
Tip #1: Rethink the Digital Customer Journey
Because of the rapid growth that businesses have undergone, e-commerce brands have not had an opportunity to slow down and evaluate the experience they are delivering. The acceleration of digital roadmaps during the pandemic has meant that many elements might have been half-baked. Now that the “new normal” is underway, e-commerce brands should rethink the digital customer journey.
Tip #2: Invest in Customer Care
A lot of businesses had to scale back their customer care teams during the pandemic because they couldn’t cope with the sheer amount of call volumes enquiring about updated delivery processes and updated policies. We saw in these times of crisis that much of customer care is related to the digital journey. When customers have an inquiry, you need to find ways for customers to self-serve or use technology to reduce the number of enquiries that need to involve your care team.
Tip #3: Upgrade Your Technology
Advanced technology is now available to intercept customers browsing on site, and ask them questions to understand their current experience. InMoment’s Digital Intercept solution has the ability to capture rich data from logged in users when they’re taking a survey.
You can also integrate InMoment’s Rapid Resolution Engine, which is designed to analyse customer verbatim in real time. The technology uses tags that are customised to your businesses to provide helpful links, ultimately resolving concern and complaints, or “solve in survey,” before customers have to call into the contact centre.
Tip #4: Collect All Pieces of Data Possible: Explicit + Implicit + Operational
Most brands are proficient at collecting explicit data like NPS scores and customer verbatim. But have you considered layering implicit data over the top of it? Implicit data points like customer sentiment, emotion, cursor movement, and more can help you paint a more accurate picture of the customer experience. As a final step, adding in operational data like customer value and segmentation will allow you to be really targeted to the best place to trigger a digital intercept along the customer journey.
For more on upgrading customer experiences in e-commerce, check out this eBook “4 Digital Quick Wins”
For many years now, conventional wisdom has held that the best way to listen to as many customers as possible is to turn every customer listening post within your customer experience (CX) program on and simply capture all insights that come your way. This strategy makes a simple kind of sense on paper; if you’re listening to as many people as possible, you’re bound to hear something pertinent to your CX and organizational goals, right?
The answer to that question is more complicated than conventional wisdom would have you believe. While it’s true that this approach will gain you a lot of data, a large portion of it may be wholly irrelevant to the CX goals you’re trying to achieve. At the same time, you may miss out on highly relevant data when you focus only on customer listening posts while leaving other signals, such as behavioral and operational data, aside.
So, is there a better, more efficient way to find data pertinent to what you need your program to achieve? As it happens, the answer is yes, and we’re going to get into it right now!
Where the Drive for Data Came From
If there’s a more targeted approach to gathering the data and insights you need to achieve Experience Improvement (XI), why is the standard approach to simply gather as much data as possible? To answer this question, we need to remember that over the last 20 years, the word “data” has been seen by many organizations as a prescription for any business, technology, or marketplace problem. At the same time, the cost to capture and analyze data has also gone down significantly.
But don’t be under any illusions; just turning listening posts on and gathering as much data as possible does not translate directly to actionable business and experience solutions. Frankly, in most cases where CX programs are not focused and use all kinds of listening posts but rarely all relevant behavioral, operational, and contextual data, the resulting insights frequently leave brands with an endlessly tall mountain of white noise. That’s the state of affairs for far too many experience programs, and it’s why a lot of them fail.
A Better Approach
Rather than begin by flipping every light switch on and inhaling as much data as possible, brands should take a further step back when activating or refurbishing their experience program. They must, quite simply, design their program with their end goal in mind before any listening posts are even activated and before deciding which other data to ingest.
Taking time to design with the end in mind also allows you to consider which audiences are most relevant to which goals, as well as the approaches you need to take in order to connect to each one. This is a more targeted methodology than simply lying in wait for a large lake of data, and while it requires more initial legwork, the end result is a wealth of actionable intelligence that by and large curates itself.
Starting with clarity on intended outcomes and getting company-wide agreement on key performance indicators (KPI’s) gives your team concrete, quantifiable goals to connect your initiative to. It lays the basis for the management support and corporate buy-in you need to be successful.
Applying What You’ve Learned
Whether you’re intending to strengthen loyalty and grow your business with existing customers or to make efforts to win new ones, the approach I’ve laid out here makes all the difference when it comes not ‘just’ to ensuring the success of your CX program, but also creating Experience Improvement for your customers and employees that drives business outcomes. Patience and forethought will save you time that you’d otherwise spend attempting to connect data to business outcomes.
And, don’t forget to design your customer listening posts (and, consequently, your products and services) in an inclusive way. This is imperative not only from an ethical perspective, but also key to making your Experience Improvement initiatives truly effective from CX and EX standpoints.
Click here to read my full-length PoV on how customer listening with diversity and inclusion in mind can make the methodology I’ve detailed here even more beneficial for your customers, your employees, and your bottom line.
If your products or services aren’t performing well, it might not be because of the product itself. Instead, there could be a problem with the customer journey. Your customers’ journey can drastically affect how your customers experience your company—and whether or not they eventually become loyal to your brand. And it’s because of this fact that improving your customer journey is vital to overall business success. Wondering how to get started? We’ll walk you through the first steps to optimizing your customer journey.
What Is the Customer Journey?
The customer journey is the process a customer goes through from awareness to purchasing and beyond. To provide an exceptional customer journey, you need to understand your customers—how they interact with your website and what they’re really looking for. It’s important to point out that the customer journey is different from the customer experience (CX). Customer journeys are what your customers are doing, while the experience is how they’re feeling. A fully optimized customer journey can help improve your customer experience.
While the exact steps in the customer journey can vary, these are the six most important parts of the journey:
The Problem
First, customers need to realize they have a problem, a need, or a want that must be solved. Once they recognize a problem, they can begin looking for solutions, which should hopefully lead them to your company.
Awareness
During this stage, the customer is gathering information, researching, and looking for options to solve the problem. Hopefully with your marketing efforts and channels, the customer will come across your company and become aware of your solution to their problem. They’ll still be weighing options and researching what suits them best, but this stage is a great place to use content to showcase your brand.
Consideration
During this stage, your customer will be considering using your product or service. They may be deciding between you and another option and debating pricing options, prioritizing features, and weighing drawbacks. When a customer is considering, brand recognition is crucial. Having a trusted and well-established brand could be what sways a customer toward your product during this stage.
Purchase
The customer decides on your product and makes the purchase. Even once they’ve purchased your product, companies benefit from reaching out to customers and acknowledging the purchase.
Retention
Once a customer has bought a product or service, it doesn’t mean they will return to your company again. A key part of the customer journey is retaining the customer for future purchases. Providing support is important for retention. You want customers to come back again and again and to look for your product or service when faced with a problem.
Loyalty
Once your customer comes back to you a few times, they’ll start to develop loyalty to your brand. Loyal customers will almost always come to your company if they can because they trust your products, services, and customer experience. Getting to the loyalty stage takes effort, but loyal customers are the goal of every company.
A Customer Journey Example
Let’s walk through what the customer journey could look like. A hypothetical manager at a finance company recognizes an ongoing issue with managing data for customers. She starts looking for a data management solution. Her friend in the industry recommends the data management solution he uses while another networking contact recommends a different one. She also uses internet searches and reviews to find more. Targeted ads on Google and company social media also bring in a few more options. She pulls together a comprehensive list of all of her options for high quality data management solutions.
Using reviews and priorities, she whittles her list down to two companies. Once she has her two favorites, she then uses the companies’ software demos and pricing packages to consider each one. She makes her selection based on which one works best for her company and is the most affordable. Once she purchases the data management software, the company acknowledges and thanks her for her purchase, which helps her feel valued as a customer.
A few months later, this same manager is looking for data architecture solutions that will provide security and big data management. She remembers her experience with the data management company and starts her search on that particular website. When she sees they offer software for her needs, she spends less time in the consideration stage and moves quickly into purchasing. She also begins recommending the company to other people in the industry when they’re looking for similar products. Someday, this manager could be loyal to this company and go to them for all of her data needs.
The Importance of Improving the Customer Journey
Understanding how your customer moves through the customer journey and planning for it is important to gaining and retaining customers. The Aberdeen Group did a study on the use of formal customer journey improvements in companies and discovered some key benefits:
18 time faster average sales cycles
10 times improvement in customer service costs
5 times greater revenue from customer referrals
54% greater return of marketing investment
Overall, this study shows that companies that focus on customer journeys can benefit in revenue and profitability. Optimizing the customer journey also helps decision makers at the company to stay focused on customers. It also helps improve the customer experience and your brand. A well-optimized customer journey makes the purchasing process easier and more enjoyable for the customers, which improves their experience.
Optimizing Your Customer Journey
Improving your customer journey is crucial to improving customer experience and benefiting from increased revenue and profitability. These are some of the best ways to improve your customer journey:
Understand Your Customer
To fully understand how to improve your customer experience and journey, you need to know who your customers are. There are many ways to go about understanding your customers: analytic research, informal qualitative research, carefully crafted personas, and more. These methods will help you know what your customers want, what they need, and what your brand can provide.
Identify Touch Points
Anytime a potential customer interacts with your brand, you have a touchpoint. Your touchpoints could be ads, your website homepage, a physical storefront, reviews, newsletters, phone calls with sales, or emails. Once you identify all the touchpoints, you can then find the obstacles that might make the journey difficult or cause potential customers to drop off. A broken website link, no set-up voicemail, or unclear ads could cause unnecessary difficulty and lose you customers. By keeping track of your touchpoints, you can optimize them to keep your customers moving through your customer journey seamlessly.
Create a Customer Journey Map
Customer journey mapping involves visualizing the journey your customer takes through the process of gaining awareness of your product to purchase. This map will illustrate how your customers move through their journey for your company and on your website. Using customer research and touchpoints, you can map out exactly what steps a customer takes and what you can do to make it simple. Creating this map will give you greater insight into where your potential customers are falling away and where your company can fill needs.
Improving your customer journey will help your customers learn about your company, products, and services. It will also help you keep your customers moving seamlessly through to the purchasing stage. But ultimately, your customer journey can help you improve your customer experience. Your customers can enjoy the ease and support your company offers them. To improve your customers’ journey, you’ll need tools to understand your customers and to utilize your touchpoints. InMoment CX solutions provide feedback and active listening tools to help you understand where to tighten your process and bring more customers to your brand. Improve your customer experience with InMoment.
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