Managing Customer Experience and Relationships. Don Peppers

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      Customer experience journey mapping begins with customer experience (CX). When CX is done well, it can and should involve every aspect of the company—its strategy, tactics, investments, hiring approaches, products, and services, and how it creates and lives its brand promise. Companies who excel at CX are more profitable and enjoy significant competitive advantage.

Executives estimate that their potential revenue loss for not offering a positive, consistent, and brand-relevant customer experience is 20% of their annual revenue. (That would be $400 million for a $2 billion firm.) And even worse, once lost, 27% of customers are lost forever.¹¹ Other typical reactions to a poor CX or low trust include:

       Blocked phone numbers (80%).

       Closed accounts (84%).

       Unsubscribing from email lists (84%).

       Deleted apps because of push notifications (82%).

       Unfollowing brands on social channels (86%).¹²

CX is about growth:

      EXHIBIT 3.4 Customer Journey Mapping Goals

      As we discuss CX here, we are defining it as the totality of a customer's individual interactions with a brand over time. In other words, this discussion is about what a company can do to make the customer's experience better—not necessarily every possible thing that could happen to a customer, including the kinds of things outside the control of the company. It's about the experience that is intended for a customer at an individual and personal level more than the general experience received. Customer experience is therefore more about their “experience” and not generalized to the customer's world.

      But understanding customer experience should go beyond the aggregate of the company-controlled aggregate of CX. This is about the actual—real—customer journey solely from the perspective of the customer. Some call it outside-in. In some cases, especially at the start of the customer's journey, the company has no idea that they are even being considered. This journey includes stages and activities that go beyond the company to partners and providers. If a company seeks to figure out how to deliver great customer experiences, the first requirement is deep self-awareness—awareness of what it is as a company, of its purpose, values, strengths, and weaknesses. Some companies use customer journey mapping to help put together the myriad puzzle pieces of their own company.

      Customer journey mapping (CJM)—or customer experience journey mapping (CXJM)—is a tool for envisioning, designing, and visualizing a holistic experience from the customers' point of view. It helps a company understand the customers' journey from their initial need for a company's product or service, to the way they research the competition, how they select a company, the purchasing process, using the product or service, and repurchasing or churning out.

According to Pointillist, 93% of high-performing organizations have said a customer journey strategy is very or extremely important to their organization's overall success, as compared to 63% of underperformers. The majority of high-performing organizations (68%) have a role or team dedicated to journey management, compared to 31% of underperformers. Overall, slightly more than half (53%) of organizations currently have a dedicated customer-journey-based role or team, 10% plan to add a dedicated role or team, and 19% have aligned their existing roles/teams with a journey-based approach.¹³

      And according to Hanover Research, organizations most often use journey maps to guide leadership or strategy meetings and aid in decision making. A majority of respondents report journey maps help them increase customer satisfaction (95%), develop new products or services (92%), and identify gaps in communication touchpoints (91%).

      The goal is to help a company gain insights and understand its customers' journey (using service, sales and marketing materials, data, voice of the customer (VoC) and voice of the customer from the employee perspective, NPS and other qualitative survey results, etc.) to create visual maps based on compelling rational and emotional evidence.

      To create a great CX, a company must first understand the customer's experience. Like similar methods such as human-centered design and design thinking, journey mapping encourages collaboration and sharing. By getting everyone at the company on the same page to form the basis of a longer-term strategic plan to build customer value, it also educated and enables change.

One global automotive company saved hundreds of thousands of dollars and improved onboarding satisfaction rates when the journey mapping effort revealed that six separate invitations to join different memberships were going out to new car buyers within the first two weeks of buying their car. By discovering and fixing this issue, the company mitigated customer frustration by creating an interactive portal lowering the number of outbound interactions by two-thirds. They enabled the customer to have one-stop access to all of the benefits and opportunities as well as to sign up for channel preferences and their first service visit. Communications and satisfaction improved almost immediately and costs dropped. Not surprisingly, engagement and opt-ins increased. The company now has a team and methods/research approach in place to provide long-term benefits and insights for customers, employees, and leadership.¹⁴

This drawing presents a typical journey flow:

      EXHIBIT 3.5 A Sample Customer Journey, Mapped

      Source: East Bay Group, 2021

From the company's perspective, customer life cycles tend to be continuous and linear, whereas actual customer journeys may not be. Customers tend to approach decisions in a way that may be quite convoluted. It often includes influencers, competitors, and lots of online/offline interactions. This example is a customer's decision-making process in buying an item:

      EXHIBIT 3.6 A Sample Customer's Decision-Making Process

      Source: East Bay Group, 2021

      Using CJM, a company can create the basis for actionable, repeatable documentation of each customer group as they interact with the company from start to finish.

      What Is Not Customer Journey Mapping?

      Many people mistake journey mapping for an inside-out view of their interactions to a customer, not taking into account that the customer is actually doing many things invisible to the company or not actually seeing that outbound lob that a company is pushing out. Many companies also focus on their email or Web sites—the easiest place to track a customer. That results in seeing a digital clickstream that shows the company where its customers move around its mobile or digital properties. Unless that's the company's only way of interacting with its customers and vice versa, then it only sees a portion of the big picture.

      CJM is also not looking at a company's database using analytics around aggregate performance or response metrics. Remember, customers are feeling beings who can think, and mapping will need to evaluate emotional elements as well as rational.

Finally, it's not the equivalent of any single-dimension measure, such as Net Promoter Score or a social sentiment measure. Both of these elements serve a purpose, but they tend to measure only those willing to take the time to give a company a score and don't usually measure what or why, which are