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Most organizations say planning for new customer journeys is their number 1 priority, but that doesn’t mean they’re killing it in that department. A study by Oracle released in March found 81% of organizations say that their customers’ journeys are largely non-linear, bouncing between stages, channels and devices.
Where do many of them run into troubles? They don’t target micro-moments in the customer journey, capitalizing after data and analysis on those very moments that matter in terms of customer interactions and influencing positive journeys. The journey is a process that’s composed of critical moments of interaction and influence, yet, according to the data, only 36% of the mainstream are targeting micro-moments in the customer journey, in comparison with 52% of top performers.
Winning Formula: Communication, Front Line Support, Journey Orchestration
Micro-moments matter, customer experience (CX) experts told CMSWire. How do you get to defining those micro-moments and customer journeys? First, recognize the problems. Too many organizations don’t build effective communication, front line support and lack a solid technological strategy that leads to true customer journey orchestration, according to Hank Brigman, customer experience consultant.
Brigman lays out a foundation for building customer journeys:
Build Effective Communication
- Define journey nomenclature.
- Frame goals and results in the language of leaders: Financial.
- Why: Alignment and to gain job stability and resources.
Build Front Line Support
- Start simple. Don’t tackle the obvious problem (there is a reason it is the obvious problem).
- Focus on improving employee experiences while improving customer experiences.
- Why: Build internal momentum and enhance results.
Build to Journey Orchestration
- Understand and evangelize the latest journey orchestration technology.
- Obtain a platform applying AI and machine learning to facilitate journey analytics and personalized next best actions.
- Why: Improve KPIs and help establish customer experiences as a competitive advantage.
Adapt the Language of Customer Experience for Executives
Brigman emphasizes communication, because organizational executive leaders speak in the language of finance. “I learned early on that to make customer experience work in an organization you need to put it in the language of the leaders, and the language of the leaders is financial,” Brigman told CMSWire. Customer touchpoints and journey mapping are great efforts, but translating those efforts into how an executive leader would say “yes” to requested resources is the ultimate goal, Brigman added.
Define your customer experience nomenclature, he added. Your organization’s leaders will have degrees in several arenas, but there is no definitive degree for customer experience, Brigman said. Help them, in that case. What is a touchpoint? What is a journey? What is an experience? “Those terms,” Brigman said, “mean different things to different people who hear them. So the first step is having the same definition of the key terms that customer experience professionals use.”
Related Article: One Reason Personalization Fails? Customer Journey Mismanagement
How One Company Views Journey Owners
The customer experience team at Nu Skin Enterprises cares very much about customer micro moments. The company, which reported 2019 revenues at $2.42 billion, distributes more than 200 anti-aging products in both the personal care and nutritional supplements categories.
A big part of its CX efforts is viewing customer experience through the lens of journeys and the moments that matter. They do this through assigning journey owners in sales, consumer and employee arenas. Cody Webb, director of global customer experience and loyalty and global consumer journey owner at Nu Skin, works in a dotted line relationship with the president of Nu Skin and other journey owners to manage and socialize CX journey maps and personas and to prioritize the needs of the customer according to the data the team gathers. He also works daily with the digital product owners to plan and review sprint work and engages with the UX team to get deeper user insight with the goal of customer empathy so that solutions are meeting or exceeding customer expectations. (Webb also serves as a member of CMSWire's Reader Advisory Board)
Additionally, Webb works as a “Micro Journey Team Lead,” one of many different cross-functional teams identified to improve pain points or deliver peak experiences identified in the journey work.
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Customer Always at the Center
Working across departments is critical to the business and the effort to improve customer experience, according to Evita Singson, VP, global sales leader and journey owner for sales at Nu Skin. Collectively, they’re responsible for understanding the critical customer journeys and the “moment of truth" that drives customer to move from one journey to the next, Singson said. “Part of that is establishing clear standards toward data driven analysis," she added. "When you make an opinion, it has to be data driven. We want to make sure that when we look at their needs that it is really driven by some data that we are continuously collecting. We are responsible for identifying areas of priority and evaluating the work that addresses some of those most critical needs.”
To be customer-obsessed, the cross-department and cross-function teams put the customer at the center of everything it does. “All of these functions that have typically been working in silos we make sure that the customer needs and the customer experience is paramount from beginning to end,” Singson said. “We want to make sure that the customer is top of mind and as journey owners, we are investing and influencing stages in that development.”
Related Article: How Has the Customer Journey Shifted?
Data, Analysis Leads to Moments that Matter Most
The journey owners execute a correlation analysis of over 52 touchpoints and a likelihood to repurchase rating. This correlation analysis effectively allows teams to see which experience had the strongest influence on a customer’s likelihood to repurchase. That effort is also referred to a “customer deep dive survey.”
“It’s a deep analysis of our customers’ interactions with the company across 50-plus experiences,” Webb said. “And basically what it comes down to is we ask them to rate their satisfaction with those 50-plus experiences with the company, and we've identified all of these micro experiences or micro journeys.”
A cross-correlation analysis includes asking customers their likelihood to purchase within three months, and ultimately that helps the CX team determine those “moments that matter most,” as Webb describes it. “What are those experiences that will actually elevate their satisfaction, so that we can concentrate on those and ignore the rest,” Webb said. “That's really where our value comes in as an organization — to prioritize those moments that matter the most.”
That data through the deep dive survey is applied within journey maps, and the CX team shares that data with the multiple global markets and functional teams they work with to help them see what their customers are saying about their experience areas and the moments that matter most. “When you're talking about a global organization and one global team, trying to meet customer needs, that gets very difficult because you want to be targeted,” Webb said. ‘You want to meet the needs of your customers. And so we formed these programs that are flexible enough for a Southeast Asia regional rep to come in and say their checkout process is similar to yours but we have this specific need, whether it's a specific payment type or whether it's a different expectation of a mobile experience. But they come into this cross functional, cross-market team to meet customer needs.”
