Despite the ever-increasing quantity of attention being paid particularly in industries such as retail, improving customer experience remains a huge opportunity.
Why?
Experience customers expect, because there’s a major gap between the consumer, and also also the experience that brands are capable of delivering. While study tells us that firms are creating customer experience a priority, it’s easier than ever for customers to switch between manufacturers, and more than half say that they’ll change if experiences aren’t personalized.
Many manufacturers and siloed processes struggle while there’s a large revenue opportunity from customer experience. Meanwhile, customer expectations grow more lofty – generating a misalignment.
In Kitewheel, we have identified four phases of customer experience maturity – we have seen our clients work through those stages over the previous 5 years of working with them. This model is now shared by us with the objective of helping business value is derived by companies at any point of elegance, while ideally moving towards a more stable state.
Here’s how brands can find out how to move towards a client experience, regardless of their level of experience:
Phase 1: Realization
A company has come to the realization that customer experience is essential to achieving success against opponents and, farther, realized that the consumer journey is what finally accounts for the majority of the general experience.
It’s essential to understand customer expertise because journeys offer the framework map, assess and leverage towards a general CX strategy.
Understand customer expertise in the context of their customer journey
Most brands fall under this category – understanding the significance of utilizing customer journeys to improve customer experiences, but uncertain of how to carry on. Companies at this stage assign someone to lead customer travel initiatives and identify potentially valuable use cases – usually aimed at fixing a CX pain stage – with the goal of understanding the customer travel to a level.
The outcome within this stage is discovering the metrics which dictate the success of almost any CX initiatives.
Stage 2: Mapping
Firms at the mapping stage are moving from the theoretical – the way could we make the most of customer journeys? – into the actual – how can we get started? Firms in this stage have moved to some stakeholder committee out of a point person in charge of customer journeys, also have begun executing travel pilots to get a sense of exactly what does and what does not drive results.
The results of this phase is just one or more business cases for client journeys. From here, companies need to have a good sense of how to execute a customer journey program that makes a robust and lucrative customer experience, and will have moved from the theoretical to initiating tests of a customer that is real-time journey approach.
Phase 3: Analytics
The analytics stage consists of businesses with a customer journey program underway. Within this phase, first pilots have moved into rolling out several customer travels jobs throughout the business.
These pilots should pay for a range of use cases which could include customer acquisition, loyalty programs or customer assistance, and demand connecting different stations and approaches.
Job teams execute the customer journeys learn where analytics comes in to play approach, which is and using a test. The key outcome of the phase is actual return on the investment in customer travels, delivering a quantifiable benefit to the business to feed funding of attempts.
Phase 4: Layout
The fourth stage is when customer travels become an essential component of the customer and company experience by scaling up and out.
Customer experience so powerful it becomes the largest differentiatorbeyond cost
Businesses at this point are rare, since they exert significant resources towards scaling customer journeys across every customer-facing element of their business to guarantee a consistent and personalized experience, and have an in-depth understanding of the many journeys their customers take through a combined Journey Atlas to the business.
Not only is there a return on the investment in consumer travels, but the consumer experience itself is so powerful that it turns into the largest differentiator, beyond cost. At this stage, companies have appointed Journey Managers that were specific to run journeys.
Amazon, and Amazon Prime, is an excellent example. Amazon Prime is so personalized, convenient and flexible, that lots of consumers turn to it to get every purchase without investigating any other seller (many of which do offer lower costs), only because it’s such a strong and effortless experience.
The Path
It’s essential to realize that a customer travel strategy ought to be a lean procedure which offers business benefits.
Any travel strategy should be guided by these principles:
- Stay focused on addressing specific customer pain points
- Prove value quite early on to ensure buy-in
- Orchestrate real journeys as soon as you can, then test, learn and Enhance
- Work within the Present tech stack – change the processes, don’t make large new technology investments
Being aware of the customer experience phases, and abiding by these principles, should have you well on your way to creating a better and more aggressive experience that retains customers and drives business success.
