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Opinion: Taking your customers on a journey
The phrase 'customer journey' is in vogue at the moment, and used in a wide variety of contexts. So if the solution is 'customer journey', what is the problem?
by Richard Greenhalgh, managing director, EHS Brann Discovery
For many retailers there is a growing realisation that consumers will vote with their feet if their brand doesn't deliver on the promises it makes. This means not only winning people over in the first instance, but giving them real and tangible reasons to stay through the experience they have of every part of the brand.Unfortunately there is often a mis-match between marketing messages that hook a new customer and the service delivered by the operational parts of the business; the focus tends to be on acquiring customers with little thought as
Little things can have a huge impact. For example, a marketing department may create a great e-voucher campaign to drive shoppers to register and transact online, only for the web delivery to fall over through a lack of integration and preparation. Consumers can be left not only frustrated but actively antipathetic towards a brand that, until then, they had valued highly in the high street. The brand and its promise are instantly devalued and scarce budget has been wasted that could have had more effect elsewhere.
The same is true for every part of the customer journey. Increasingly, businesses are focussing effort on growing the relationship with existing customers rather than the harder task of acquiring new ones. So understanding the drivers that have a direct impact on the customer experience becomes even more important; if we don't know where in the customer journey we're delivering a poor service or, more importantly, what this is costing the business through lost revenue, we can't fix it. By mapping the customer journey we can identify how to plug the leaks.
Every interaction between customer and brand will have a direct influence on this journey and, ultimately, on the profitability and duration of the resulting relationship. But the reality is that businesses find it very difficult to join up the disparate silos to create an end-to-end view. This has much to do with culture and ownership, but also a lot to do with the intelligent use of management information (MI) and data.
Yet it is often the case that the MI and data needed to measure the end-to-end journey either doesn't exist or can't be pieced together easily. This comes back to the silo issue - individual parts of the business may be drowning in MI but no one has the remit or ability to piece the parts together.
The key to mapping the customer journey is to distinguish between 'hard' and 'soft' aspects and understand their inter-relation. Soft aspects concern what actually happens to a customer every time they connect with your brand, while hard aspects are all about measurement and effective use of data.
Key things to remember are: keep things simple, identify what you need to measure and the gaps to fill, then apply the measures across the whole customer journey; recognise that what gets measured gets done and measurement tools must be simple and flexible; remember that data on its own is useless, it's how we turn it into relevant information that counts.
There is also an intrinsic relationship between appreciation of the customer journey and understanding and influencing customer loyalty. Regardless of whether loyalty is defined as a behaviour or an attitude (or both), unlocking more about what motivates and encourages loyalty from this analytical point of view can have a major influence on the success of loyalty investment.
One could argue that positively influencing loyalty is as much a by-product of getting the customer journey right as it is a direct result of a dedicated loyalty programme. In fact, the two are not mutually exclusive. Just because many brands choose to label customer management as a 'loyalty scheme' does not detract from what is essentially at the heart of this activity - measuring, understanding and influencing the customer journey. With the right approach it can be simple to implement and generate huge benefits for both customers and brand. Just as CRM means many different things to different people, part of the challenge with the customer journey is in defining exactly what we mean by it.
Tagged as: Richard Greenhalgh | EHS Brann Discovery
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