In previous blogs we wrote about what the service design methodology is and when to use it. In this blog we will tell you more about the value of a customer journey map and what customer experience can do for your organization.
“customers who had the best past experiences spend 140% more compared to those who had the poorest past experience.” – Peter Kriss, Harvard business review
Let’s start with some basics and definitions. To improve customer experience, you want to move from touch points to journeys. You might have already started with the observation of current journeys and you’ve defined high value segment customers. We believe the customer journey consists of a progression of touch points that together add up to the experience, customers get when they interact with organizations. Within the journey you map the sentiment of the customers to visualize empathy to your business processes.
Innovate based on customer insights
There are many clients that ask us to help them with the transformation to become more customer centric. We notice that organizations need guidance in using all the available data and to create customer insights to innovate in business.
In this situation a customer journey map is one of the first things we start with. We map your customer insights with the current situation, needs and sentiment. Break-ages in expectations from the customer and organization become visualized. For organizations it’s very powerful to see the world as their customers do. It helps to better organize and mobilize their employees around customer needs.
Taking it a step further
Once you have your current journey visualized, you can start shaping the customer experiences. And from there you start to reshape interactions into different sequences. This will soon go further into digitizing processes and reorienting company cultures. Which means so much more than just creating a customer journey map and hanging it on the wall in your office. To focus on customer journey maps, has the ability to actually drive change.
Unfortunately not all leadership teams believe in Customer Experience. Therefore, it’s a hard job to get stakeholders on board and quantify the value of all effort for many innovators.
Make it valuable
You need to be armed with advanced analytics and insights to show why the customer needs to be at the center of the exercises, and not the organization. Based on Aberdeen Group research, some of the specific year-over-year (YoY) growth that companies with a formal customer journey management program enjoy over those that don’t, include:
54% greater return on marketing investment:
Interested in boosting the effectiveness of your marketing spend—reaching more of the right customers more quickly? Here’s an answer (The research found 24.9% YoY growth with customer journey management versus 16.2% without).
Over 10 times improvement in the cost of customer service:
Of the major areas customer experience drives ROI, reduction in costs (in addition to new business from positive word of mouth, greater wallet share, and lower churn) are among the easiest to sell internally (The research found 21.2% YoY growth with customer journey management versus -2.2% without).
24% more positive social media mentions:
This is one way to boost word of mouth and social influence among the most powerful drivers of engagement in the era of smart customers (The research found 20.7% YoY growth with customer journey management versus 16.7% without.).
3.5 times greater revenue from customer referrals:
Linking to social media mentions, but even more powerfully to analog conversations, referral customers are some of the least expensive to acquire (The research found 17.9% YoY growth with customer journey management versus 5.1% without.).
18 times faster average sales cycle:
What if you could radically accelerate the speed of your sales cycle? Good news: You can! (The research found 16.8% YoY growth with customer journey management versus 0.9% without).
56% more cross- and up-sell revenue:
With a direct linkage to greater share of wallet and customer lifetime value, increased top- and bottom line revenue follow closely behind (The research found 15.3% YoY growth with customer journey management versus 9.8% without).
We most often see that journey maps become good-looking artifacts that inform, but don’t help drive real change. In other words, just having them isn’t enough. No matter how good looking or comprehensive your journey maps are, they need to be operationalized in ways that make your customers’ lives better, and your operations more efficient and more profitable. If they don’t drive to action, they might be interesting—but they are ultimately useless.
Showcase your success
How do you know if all the steps you’ve taken are yielding the desired results? Luckily, the answer doesn’t need to be based on gut-feel. Businesses have access to a plethora of technologies designed to track, measure and report on KPI’s.
These technologies can identify how each process and stakeholder influences critical metrics such as customer satisfaction and company revenue. At Oxyma we use advanced business dashboards such as Qliksense.
