We’ve all grown up trying to figure out the answer to the age-old question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Whether you know the answer or not (I don’t), the question has great value in thinking about how you will create positive, meaningful customer experiences and how you will design your first survey instruments.
Let’s briefly address my second point first. In August 2009, I wrote a guest blog for Vovici titled “Jumping into the Pool Before You Know the Water Depth.” In that post, I talked about identifying the most important customer touchpoints before crafting a survey instrument for a continuous customer feedback collection process. The information in the post is still on target, although the way to determine importance should change – continue reading.
When it comes to actually designing your customer’s experiences (and you should create instead of just letting things randomly happen), two factors need to be considered:
- The journeys your customers will take as they interact with your business.
- The stops on each journey – touchpoints or, as Jan Carlzon called them in his 1987 book, “Moments of Truth.”
Unfortunately, most people approached this challenge by focusing on touch points since that is a more straightforward concept to wrap our heads around.
When we think about customer journeys, we must first consider why people interact with your business. This is important because some interactions, i.e., journeys, result from something wrong. For example, we call technical support because our product doesn’t work, or we can’t make it work because the manual is crap. These journeys should be eliminated or, more realistically, minimized.
Many journeys are essential, and which you do not want to eliminate or minimize. Here are a few examples:
- Get product information before making a purchasing decision
- Place an order
- Call for support
- Question an invoice
- Check on a back-order
- Make a payment
This partial list does not include all the high-level reasons for interacting with your business.
In most cases, there are multiple “channels” for the interaction. For example, consider many of the ways prospects obtain pre-sales information from your business:
- View the company website using a computer or a mobile device
- Order information online [your website or an advertisement (pop-up or Google Ad)]
- Call inside sales for preliminary information
- Talk with company representatives at a trade show
- Meet with a salesperson in the prospect’s office
- Attend a demo at your location or one of your customers
- Talk to your customers (before getting your approved references
I am sure that you will add to this list with minimal effort.
How does someone start this design process? I think the best way is to do two things in parallel:
- Identify the broken touchpoints that appear to have a high volume of interactions and fix them.
- Identify all your prospects and customers’ journeys by engaging critical people throughout your business. This will give you an intuitive listing that will undoubtedly include 95% of all choices.
- Then, follow this path:
- Make a matrix of each unique journey, its importance, and each individual touchpoint.
- Identify those touchpoints that occur in multiple journeys.
- Based on the number of interactions and the importance of each journey where they occur, create a priority list identifying the most critical touchpoints.
- Impartially evaluate the quality of the experience your prospects and customers feel at each touchpoint, using a simple green (great), yellow (ok), and red (OMG!) scale.
- Combine the lists to come up with one prioritized list of touchpoints.
- Do a quick survey of customers and prospects to establish a quantified benchmark about these touchpoint experiences’ good or bad.
- Divide the list by owners and go to work.
- Set review schedules to make sure people are staying on track.
- As touchpoints are updated, again, collect feedback to ensure that the efforts have produced tangible benefits to their intended audience.
- Share the feedback and either rework if necessary or move on to the next on the list.
- Share the results with customers and employees.
- Make sure to celebrate successes!
As you can imagine, attacking the touchpoint experience is straightforward. Still, it can result in much activity without gain if the wrong areas are prioritized. This is a significant waste of time and can derail a good CX program because a large input of scarce resources did not improve any significant business outcome.
About Middlesex Consulting
Middlesex Consulting is an experienced team of professionals with the primary goal of helping capital equipment companies create more value for their clients and stakeholders. Middlesex Consulting continues to provide superior solutions to meet the needs of its clients by focusing on our strengths in Services, Manufacturing, Customer Experience, and Engineering. If you want to learn more about how we can help your organization create better customer experiences, please contact us or check out some of our free articles and white papers here.