12 Days of Xmas #6: My head of customer experience said to me “If Santa can map his journey to deliver on time then why can’t we?”
On the 6th day of Christmas my head of customer experience said to me, “If Santa can map his journey to deliver on time then why can’t we?”
Well ok, that may be too difficult a task for us mere mortals to figure out how Santa does it, but have you ever tried to map out the journey your customers and distributors go through every day of the year to get the full benefit of your proposition?
No, well neither have many B2B organizations and in our experience, B2B businesses need to take a more pro-active approach to delivering a defined customer experience rather than allowing the experience to simply develop. This Customer Journey map, if developed accurately, provides a key contribution to delivering your customer proposition in a way that drives up satisfaction, improves relationship quality metrics and/or NPS scores.
Understanding and “managing” customer journeys sits at the heart of Customer Experience theory, and numerous approaches have been taken to map out the current and desired experience. This is not straightforward in many B2B businesses because of the inherent tripartite relationship that often exist between producer, distributor and customer and the fact that the distributor and end-customer journeys are very different.
The end-customer journey is B2C in essence with broker and provider interactions triggered by all three parties. The distributor / intermediary journey is based on multi-layered long-term B2B relationships where trust, service, mutual value, and speed/ease of multiple interactions are paramount.
If you haven’t got a customer journey map for your business, why not sit down in 2016 and make a start with developing a high level framework that summarises the journey into one illustration that can be easily explained to all concerned. Then, ensure each step in the framework is mapped in detail, with different treatments or variations to the journey clearly identified by segment or channel. Pinpoint those critical interactions as Moments of Truth (MOTs) on the journey maps. MOTs often represent a handful of critical moments where the customer experience and satisfaction is missed or exceeded.
And if you get stuck . . . just think how hard this must be for Santa OR alternatively give the team at Customer Attuned a call as we have vast experience undertaking customer journey mapping – take a look here – we can develop yours for Q1 2016
Have a view on this? Tweet to @CustomerAttune // or Tweet to @alanthom90
Contact us at: hello@CustomerAttuned.com
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Alan is a very engaging classroom tutor, and has enjoyed working with a variety of global clients over the past few years to deliver highly successful people development programmes.
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