Customer Journey of Today

Begin an inspiration workshop for your management by addressing the question of how customers experience your organization in different stages of their journey. To do that, start by setting the scene from the connected customer's perspective. Illustrate the new habits and practices of the connected customer; refer to industry research as well as data from your current analytics.

In your workshop, show how there is a dramatic shift among consumers to using smartphones and tablets to read email, browse websites, and make online purchases. Show how the rapid adoption rates and growth of social platforms—for example, Instagram, Reddit, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Yammer—are important, even for business-to-business (B2B) organizations. Make your presentation personal to the audience by showing how your brand and product/service offerings appear in search engines, online communities, and social platforms. As you do this, keep in mind the idea of walking in the customers' shoes. Get your audience in the workshop to think about what your customers want to experience, what they are looking for, what they want to do, and what problem they want to solve. Find real examples where customers describe intents, needs, requests, questions, comments, complaints, and compliments regarding your brand. Point out to the workshop attendees how these search findings and feedback can be used in your marketing.

Describe how customers embark on decision journeys with the intent of making decisions with the aid of digital touch points. Explain the contribution that positive customer experiences make toward Customer Lifetime Value. Back this up with research that quantifies the value of customer advocacy. For example, reference research that shows how advocates for a company are 5.2 times more likely to purchase again from the company and are 5.8 times more likely to forgive a company when it makes a mistake. Furthermore, use research that shows how customer experience leaders have more loyal customers. Customers are 9.5 percent more willing to purchase from companies that provide superior customer experiences.¹

Most important, gather data from your current analytics to explain key trends that impact your most important customer segments. This helps executives visualize the impact on real people who represent your customers.

Create a presentation that illustrates to your workshop audience how your customers may not be receiving a memorable experience. For example, you may want to educate them about an important customer segment and then show how people in that segment experience your company's marketing.

Structure your data and presentation to support the story of how customers currently experience your company's digital presence. Create personas for primary segments. Each persona should describe a few main characteristics that represent the segment. Be sure these characteristics include a primary behavior trait and need for relevant products and services.

Use your company's analytics to present the experience from each persona's perspective, not from your company's perspective. For example:

• Customers prefer which channels?
• Customers prefer which devices?
• Customers are attracted by which content?
• Customers are attracted by which online ads?
• Customers who make short visits tend to engage with which content and actions?
• Customers who make average and longer visits tend to engage with which content and actions?
• Customers are more likely and less likely to perform which interactions?

Using selected customer segments, create customer journeys that start with a trigger—a need, intent, or interest. Think of these journeys as the “journeys of today.” Mock up the journeys using screen shots. Keep the mockups basic and keep the focus on the overall story. When presenting these journeys, show and describe how a journey may originate in a channel, as well as what the customers experience in each moment and what their intent and behavior in the moment are. As the journey progresses on the website, the visitor may continue to view pages and perform interactions. Focus on visitor journeys that originate with digital ads according to your acquisition strategy. A journey may evolve into a second visit and so on. Visits may be direct or via channels such as email as well.

When the customer journey has progressed, stop and ask questions that lead the board to see the lack of relevance and context for each visitor segment's customer experience. Ask questions such as:

• Does the website treat each visitor the same regardless of the visitor's intent? Point out how the visitor's intent might be revealed at the outset of the visit.
• Are content and calls to action aligned with the buying stages for individual visitors? Many organizations are too focused on stages close to the buying decision, with very detailed product information in those later stages. The majority of visitors, however, are in the very early stages. So there is a gap in meeting and connecting with them emotionally and not just from a product point of view. Point out that this gap represents a significant opportunity.
• Does the website tailor the experience based on any type of segmentation? For example, does it provide the same or tailored experiences for visitors who arrive from specific channels, devices, social platforms, or referring sites?
• Does the website demonstrate that we know the customer? For example, does it recognize returning visitors or email visitors?
• Does the website recognize any preferences that the visitor may indirectly indicate? For example, can we recognize that an anonymous visitor has performed a meaningful interaction on a previous visit?
• Does the website increase the relevancy of the content and calls to action presented to visitors as the customer journey progresses?
• Does the website provide paths for customers who demonstrate satisfaction or dissatisfaction?

When guiding workshop participants through the “journeys of today,” present the journeys in a straightforward and unbiased manner. Three or four journeys, each using different customer segments, will probably be enough. Remember, for now you want to show a broad perspective and avoid side discussion that may take you off track. You simply want to show how effectively or ineffectively your company currently provides customer experiences. Executives and boards have an intense, almost painful, focus on bottom-line numbers. If you can show how these changes affect business objectives and the bottom line, you will grab their attention.

Customer Journey of Tomorrow

To address the second question for the workshop (what are some examples of how we could improve customer experiences?), create examples of “journeys of tomorrow.” The basic idea is to start with the same journeys that you presented earlier, but this time apply capabilities of more advanced stages in the Customer Experience Maturity Model.

Before presenting journeys of tomorrow, you want to pose questions such as:

• What is the core purpose of our website?
• How do we measure the effectiveness of our website?
• How do we measure the effectiveness of our investments?
• Do different marketing teams share the same metrics?
• How do we measure the effectiveness of the different marketing campaigns, teams, or individuals who work in different digital channels?

Ask rhetorically, “What can we do to increase desired outcomes?” Once you ask this, you can explain the role of contextualization and how increasing relevancy is an effective capability to drive desired outcomes. The flaw with mass marketing has always been that mass marketing communication lacks meaningfulness to its individual recipients.

At this point you may want to very quickly and briefly show workshop attendees the flow a customer should go through from Attraction to Commitment. This flow is described in Chapter 7's discussion of Stage 3—Align, as well as in Chapter 1. This flow is how customers move to commitment and advocacy:

When your audience members understand this, they can be better judges of what needs to happen at each stage in the buyer's decision journey.

An example of a new journey to show could be one that starts with a need. A customer first performs a search on Google for a product. The displayed results include online ads. The visitor clicks through an ad to the home page of your website (or a landing page). Specific content on the home page is personalized so that it is relevant for visitors who clicked on the online ad or who used specific keywords in the search. (Although this same thing can be done with a dedicated landing page for the search ad, our customers have found through A/B testing that a personalized home page produces better conversions than a product-specific landing page.)

A demonstration sequence might follow these eight steps:

1. Visitor enters keywords in a search engine.
2. Search engine returns results and a pay-per-click (PPC) ad from your company containing relevant keywords.
3. The visitor clicks on the PPC ad and is taken to your home page, which shows a banner ad personalized to the keywords in the PPC and relevant to the visitor's location. For example, a store location might be shown. (Locations are identified using GeoIP services.)
4. As the visitor browses through the website, sidebar elements show high-impact spots relevant to the original search keywords. These could be offers for downloads, videos, webinars, special purchase offers, and so on.
5. The visitor realizes that your website is very relevant and registers to get a download. The system remembers this registration email.
6. The visitor leaves the website.
7. The next time the visitor returns and logs in with their email, the website personalizes its content relevant to the user's prior interests. With more advanced personalization, the visitor will always see personalization and contextualization relevant to the user's most current needs and profile.
8. Marketing automation sends the visitor emails that inform and nurture the user to bring them back for repeat visits.

For the different persona journeys, show how data can be combined with automation to create relevant communication. You could create a combination of mobile visits, email nurtures, and social platform visits that all generate increasingly relevant visits. Show how A/B and multivariate testing can be used to increase outcomes.

At appropriate junctures in the customer journeys, stop and make points such as:

• If potential customers are presented with content that is aligned with their intentions, the customers will likely become more trusting.
• If we show content that is relevant, then potential customers are more likely to stay on our site.
• If customers are presented with calls to action that are in line with their needs and timing, then we are more likely to gain commitment.
• If customers experience that we have an understanding of their interests, timing, and psychological triggers, then it is more likely that we can sell and do repeat business.
• In addition, if customers see that we somehow recognize them—as opposed to treating them generically—then we increase the likelihood that they will return. If we can combine this with other positive experiences, then we increase the likelihood that they will recommend our company to others.
• An important point to make regarding journeys of tomorrow is how to measure effectiveness. Ideally you want to be able to measure it in relation to your key business objectives:
  • The effectiveness of relevancy
  • The effectiveness of personalization
  • The effectiveness of channels and campaigns
  • The effectiveness of content (pages, calls to action, online tools, etc.) with regard to different customer segments

You don't need to go into the details at this point of how such insights are gained; for now, you want to raise awareness about the need for the critical few metrics. You want to make the point that the right metrics are cross-channel and can equally serve the different stakeholders in terms of channel managers and line of business owners. (More about measuring effectiveness will be covered in the next subsection about top-line recommendations.)

Highlight what an improvement there is for customers by using a before-and-after approach. Compare the journeys of today with the journeys of tomorrow, and point out how much better the journeys of tomorrow are for the customer's experience. You should pinpoint areas where the customer experience becomes more engaging and meaningful for the customer and more effective at driving business objectives.

Top-Line Recommendations for Next Steps

Consider using the inspiration workshop just described to raise awareness about problems and challenges related to disconnected and less-than-satisfactory customer experiences. We recommend using these inspiration workshops as platforms for establishing the business case—starting with a clear understanding of the problem. Illustrate the problem and lay the groundwork for the solution, but avoid going into solution mode in this session.

Accordingly, you may want to prepare a list of top-line recommendations for next steps. Based on the discussions and perhaps decisions made in the inspiration workshop, the recommendations may change. In any case, consider using the following top-line recommendations as next steps at the end of the inspiration workshop.

Conduct a Customer Experience Maturity Assessment to identify your organization's current stage. Prioritize initiatives, focus area, and capabilities needed for a phased approach to reach new levels of customer experience maturity. The free Customer Experience Maturity Assessment for this book is available at the book's companion website at www.ConnectTheExperience.com/cxassessment.

Use the approach described in Chapter 7 to explain how to align business objectives and digital goals. Once the objectives and digital goals map are completed, you can focus on specific areas and capabilities your organization needs.

Conduct a Quick Wins initiative where you can create and deploy a minimal implementation of an optimized customer journey. Learn more about how to conduct a Quick Wins exercise at www.ConnectTheExperience.com/QuickWins.

You can measure the effectiveness of the optimization as a way of getting firsthand insights into customer experience improvements.