1. Real commitment and action...but not always visible results.
Every day, we meet companies from a wide range of sectors and sizes, who have been trying for some years to capitalize on the new opportunities offered by data, digital and new technologies in their approach to customers. Within these organizations, numerous projects are emerging, driven by sales, marketing and customer relations teams. These projects are often relevant, and carried out with great enthusiasm.
These teams implement actions (web or point-of-sale campaigns, communications, CRM deployment, etc.) and operational processes dedicated to a particular target or channel, in response to the challenges they face.
As a result, managers often lack an overall vision of the effectiveness of these action plans, and come to doubt their effective contribution to business development.
The question then arises: how can we effectively manage customer relations to achieve effective, measurable results?
2. For consistent actions and measurable results: define your multi-channel customer journey!
All these projects need to be structured around the Multichannel Customer Journey (the term "customer" includes both customers and prospects). Indeed, defining a multi-channel customer journey is highly structuring, on three levels:
A. At the operational level, this makes it possible to :
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- prioritize actions across all channels,
- to focus on Moments of Truth,
- work to improve the Customer Experience, whatever the target audience
B. In terms of project management, this makes it possible to :
Timing projects so that they progress at the same pace, across all stages of the customer journey. These projects are complex because they all have 3 operational dimensions: new processes, new tools and new skills for the teams who will use them. They are also cross-functional, involving several departments, which is why they need to be managed by a common organization, with one person in charge.
C. In terms of management, this enables :
Implement global performance indicators. The pitfalls often encountered are threefold:
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- drowning under the mass of highly detailed indicators (web-based analysis tools are very precise)
- lack of cross-functional analysis of the performance of these action plans,
- not be able to link them to the customer satisfaction rate.
3. Defining the Multichannel Customer Journey doesn't mean starting from scratch!
Many of these projects are already up and running. It's more a question of giving a backbone to all these initiatives, by :
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- reinforcing the overall coherence of actions across channels, stages and targets,
- prioritizing projects and building missing bricks (processes and tools)
- defining the indicators that will provide the CODIR with an overall reading of the effectiveness of these new projects.
KESTIO is currently helping a number of companies to define their multi-channel customer journey, with the aim of improving the customer experience and hence recruitment and retention rates. We use our exclusive Welcome Experience method to define the multi-channel customer journey (stages and contact points, "moments of truth"), measure the level of experiential quality throughout this journey, and then determine the actions to be taken in terms of improvement and innovation.
To learn even more about the customer journey, we recommend you read the article "5 key points for defining and optimizing your customer journey".
