(If you haven't already, we invite you to rediscover the reasons why customer experience is a strategic topic and how customer delight affects your profitability !) You probably even already have an idea of the target customer experience you're aiming for, a vision and an ambition for it... But do you know where to start to achieve it? The starting point is invariably to define and optimize your customer journey. Here's a look at the fundamentals of customer journey design and evaluation, the prerequisite for any customer experience improvement project.
1. By the way, what is the Customer Journey?
The customer journey is all the stages and points of interaction between a customer and a company, from the start of the purchasing process through to complete consumption of the product.
To simplify, there are 3 main phases in this process:
- BEFORE: all preliminary stages, from active or passive awareness of the offer through to the purchasing process, including the purchasing decision phase
- DURING: the "delivery" process, integrating all the stages involved in making the service or product available and consuming or using it.
- AFTER: After-sales processes, including customer service, measuring customer satisfaction, and the entire relational process for maintaining contact and building customer loyalty.
The challenge is to smooth the loop from AFTER to BEFORE.
In this sense, and even if they partially overlap, the customer journey differs from the customer lifecycle. The lifecycle is a much more macroscopic observation of the successive passage from prospect to active customer to lost customer. It may therefore contain several iterations of the customer journey, or even several journeys, depending on the change in the customer's state.
2. What is the purpose of customer journey modeling?
When it comes to improving the customer experience, modeling the customer journey is the first necessary step.
This makes it possible to :
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- identify all stages of the customer journey and all points of contact between the customer and the company,
- determine the importance of each contact point in the customer experience,
- assess the company's level of response at these contact points,
- define and implement the improvements needed to meet the company's ambitious response levels.
While this approach was first deployed for companies in the BtoC sector, it is increasingly being replicated and adapted to companies in the BtoB sector.
3. Define the customer journey
There isn't just one customer path. Depending on its customer typology, a company can offer different customer paths: this is the case, for example, for companies with an intermediary clientele comprising distributors, specifiers, installers and end consumers, or for those who want to offer a very different path to their best customers.
A touchpoint is defined as an interaction between the customer and the company, via a specific physical or digital channel. The interaction can be informative or transactional, and triggered either by the company (push) or by the customer (pull).
For example, reading an advertisement online or in a magazine, receiving a promotional email, visiting the company's website, entering a store, calling customer service, receiving a parcel, receiving an order confirmation email, receiving an invoice, and so on.
The customer journey stage is not systematically linked to a point of contact. It can be experienced in the customer's journey without direct interaction with the company. For example, a recommendation by a third party on a social network, a trip and a mode of transport to the company.
4. Evaluate the level of importance of the stage of the journey
Not all stages of the customer experience are created equal. It's often said that the first and last points of contact in the customer journey are the ones that most shape the customer's feelings, whether positive or negative. There are also other stages, often the most delicate, which together with the first and last impressions left represent the key stages.
We call these "moments of truth" key stages which, depending on how the company handles them, can turn a customer into a loyal customer... or a lost one.
The challenge is to meet and exceed expectations at a critical moment for the customer.
A few examples: the receipt of a parcel or the return procedure for an e-commerce company, the presentation of the invoice for a garage, the welcome on arrival for a hotel, the availability of the product for a store, the presentation of a proposal for a service company, the accessibility of customer service for a transport company, etc.
Satisfactory coverage of customer expectations at these stages is an anchor for loyalty. Failure to cover them encourages customers to leave.
5. Evaluate the level of response to customer expectations
It's important to assess the level of satisfaction delivered, taking into account the expectations and needs of different types of customer. Because not all customers are the same, it is necessary to detect and create customer segments according to their expectations, and in some sectors even to personalize the customer journey.
A family doesn't have the same needs as a couple in a ski resort, a DIY enthusiast doesn't have the same expectations as a professional in a tool shop, an SME doesn't have the same expectations in its car fleet management with a rental company.
It is also essential to consider the multi-channel dimension of the customer journey, respecting the customer's choice of preferred channel(s), and the "omnichannel" dimension of the customer journey, enabling customers to pursue their customer experience seamlessly, across all relationship channels and with all the company's contacts.
At all stages of the customer journey, and particularly at the moments of truth, we help companies measure their level of response to customer expectations, so as to define effective and relevant actions to be implemented to improve the customer experience and generate delight.
The WelcomeExperience® method proposed by KESTIO makes it possible to
- define multi-channel customer paths
- assess the criticality of interaction points
- assess the level of satisfaction delivered
to develop an effective plan for improving the customer experience.
