To improve customer experience, you need to move from touchpoints to journeys.
You need to stop thinking offline and online, shopper and consumer. People, as in your potential customers, don’t think in the way that we have segmented marketing and our businesses. They think about themselves and what they want to achieve and how they are going to achieve this.
So how do we do it?
Phase one: Understanding your customer & market
Where we will bring together research and challenge assumptions.
In this phase we use insights (market, business & consumer) to help us understand who your key customers are. What they need and expect, how you can deliver against their expectations. As well as understanding your position in the market.
Outputs include:
Audits
Segmentation Models
Personas
Phase two: Addressing the experience gap
In this phase we map out your customer’s pain points to close the gaps between expectations and the current experience. This will provide us with the sweet spots to focus our efforts for optimal results. We need to ensure we integrate customer measures into your business KPI’s.
Outputs include:
Journey Maps
Experience Architectures
Strategy Maps
Priority Backlogs
Phase 3 Transforming your business to be customer committed
Working through your Priority Backlog to create disruption in your marketplace, putting customers at the heart of your organisation and driving valuable results back to the business.
Outputs include:
Internal training
Channel strategies
Marketing campaigns
Innovation sprints
Phase one in detail
To truly understand what makes your audience tick, how to speak to them, and how to win them over, creating Buyer Personas is vital. If you have a deep understanding of what your consumer is looking for, what satisfies them and what they value, you have a chance of turning their interest into true brand loyalty.
Personas are fictional archetypes that represent a company’s target customers. When creating them, you want your Personas to be as realistic as possible. And the only way to achieve that is to learn as much as you can about the people you want to interact with.
The bedrock of Personas is research.
First, start off with some basic biographical information.
Next, you’ll want to define their goals.
Then, it’s good to clearly define the persona’s frustrations or pain points.
Phase two in detail
Journey Mapping highlights where you are delivering an exceptional experience, building loyalty and advocacy. And where you’re delivering a poor experience, driving your customers to competitors.
That means you go step by step by step to depict the journey, to capture the customer’s story of the experience, to depict the timeline of steps they took to go from point a to point b.
Approximately 70% of the time we develop Journey Maps. When we need to do rapid disruption in the marketplace we develop Experience Architecture Maps instead.
For CX Journey Maps we visualise the process a Persona goes through in order to accomplish a goal. Understanding what the Persona is doing, thinking, and feeling throughout the experience.
For Journey Mapping you need to:
View things from the customer’s perspective
Capture any kind of detail about the experience
Able to tell where things go right or wrong
Understand what the customer is doing, thinking, and feeling throughout the experience
Able to develop the corresponding service plan to fix what’s happening to support the experience
For CX Experience Architecture we take it a step further and are able to develop the corresponding service plan to fix what’s happening to support the experience.
For Experience Architecture Mapping you need to have:
Journey Mapping
The user mindset
Emotional curve
The phasing
How we are going to inspire
How are we going to satisfy
We take the insights from the Personas & Journeys and carry out a deep dive to develop insights and guiding principles. At this stage we bring together the insights unearthed in phase one and phase two. Through these analyses we will understand the experience gap and what needs to be done across the various touchpoints and lanes.
The output is a Strategy Map. This is our master blueprint. It is the most important aspect to get complete buy-in, as this shapes the marketing, products and services.
Strategy Map:
It summarises all the Lanes - Brand, Paid Media, Social, CRM, product development.
Summary of insights learnt - what we know from the Personas and Journey Mapping
The ambition to achieve the future state
The diagnosis - what is the current core issue
Our guiding principles - our mantra for this lane
Our action plan across time - what we will do
KPI - what metrics we will track
KPI - what metrics we will track
Once we are aligned on the Strategy Map we develop the Priority Backlog. This encompasses products, services, comms & marketing that we need to develop to achieve the Future State Journey’s and ambitions spelt out in the Strategy Map.
We start with hypothesis of “because”, “who”, “what”.
Each line item on the backlog is rated in priority and we divide into squads and carry out sprints.
For example:
Because … it’s difficult to find the stuff you really want on conventional e-commerce platforms.
Who.. everyone of the personas
What…. value a service, which does the curating heavy lifting and suggest a small number of options on demand.
Phase three in detail
CX is action orientated. It doesn’t live in a presentation but in the action plans and moments of interaction. It is always in a state of optimisation. Now you need to ensure your business becomes CX obsessed and uses your Personas, maps and backlog to guide each and every action and decision.
At this stage we have the blueprints and action plans, now we need to bring it to life. Working through your Priority Backlog to create disruption in your marketplace, putting customers at the heart of your organisation and driving valuable results back to the business.
Shaping:
Internal comms - after all your staff are also your customers
Call centre experiences
Staff development
Innovation plans - product development
Marketing strategies
Channel strategies
Campaigns & comms
Remember, delivering your CX can only be achieved by aligning the whole organisation behind the CX Vision, CX Strategy & partaking in the CX implementation. Successful business alignment means that Marketing, HR and Operations must have a collective role in the planning and implementation, to ensure that the right skills and knowledge as well as infrastructure and processes are in place.
