The Five Questions to Understanding Customer Journeys

Every marketeer knows the power of conversion rate optimisation, as they scrutinise each element of their new customer acquisition journey.? But why doesn’t every part of a business do it?

Businesses are made up of hundreds of customer journeys, each influencing a company’s financial performance.? Think of all the activities your customers do online, all the requests your operations teams respond to, all the communications sent to customers or receive from customers.? Every activity that directly or indirectly serves a customer is a customer journey.?

Optimised journeys increase customer volumes, increase customer lifetime value, improve customer experience, and reduce cost to serve.? Ultimately a business that focuses on optimising all customer journeys will be more profitable.? It should be core to every department in every business, and a central obsession to management teams’ strategies to improving business performance

Delivering the economic benefits of optimised customer journeys is what PrinSIX does.? Analytical insights identify friction inside our clients’ businesses, and our technology removes it.? Friction felt by the customer, by operations teams serving customers. Friction that slows technical change and blocks actionable insight from business data.?

We always start in the same place - asking five key questions.? Questions which will ultimately transform our clients’ businesses. ??

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1.???? Do we know what all our customer journeys?

A study by Forrester found that 89% of companies are unable to predict customer behaviour accurately because they don’t track the actual customer journeys. Instead, they focus on the paths they WANT customers to take, not the ones they ACTUALLY take.

PrinSIX often sees customer journeys becoming inconsistent when manual operational processes are involved. ?Agents, in their efforts to serve the customer, tend to take varied approaches and workarounds leading to a diverse set of customer experiences.? None of these customer journey paths are by design and are rarely focused on.? They are a result of trying to serve customers’ needs that have not considered in journey design. ??

You can’t optimise journeys or understand the impact they are having on customer experience if you can’t see them.?

2.???? Did we design them with customer at the centre?

Businesses design "happy path" journeys—idealised, one-size-fits-all pathways that assume every customer will follow the same predictable and straightforward behaviour, start to finish. The reality is that customer behaviour is far more complex. Customers may take unexpected detours, face obstacles, or abandon the journey altogether due to unaddressed pain points.? They may want to do it in stages, across different devices, or different channels.? They may have specific needs that must be accommodated.?

PrinSIX creates value by understanding these different customer behaviours, and configuring journeys that minimise friction for every customer, personally.? A great example is the “happy path” customer journey that assume every customer completes the process in a single attempt. ?Very often they don’t.? By incorporating re-engagement communications and offering easy journey re-entry points for those who drop out, there is a significant uplift in both conversion rates and overall customer experience.? Deploy AI powered personalisation to re-contact strategies and conversion grows still further.

Don’t leave it to the customer to design their customer journey – it will probably be an unhappy one for everyone – slow, inconsistent, unreliable and ineffective.? Every customer journey must be designed by you with the customer at its heart

3.???? Are we measuring how well they work?

According to a report by McKinsey, while 80% of companies believe they deliver superior customer experiences, only 8% of customers agree. This discrepancy highlights a significant gap in understanding and managing the true customer journeys that drive business success.?

How can such a discrepancy exist?? Because businesses track the end results without paying sufficient attention to the customer experience, or the customer journeys that deliver that experience.? Measuring customer journey conversion for every journey creates a quantifiable measure of the customer experience.?

PrinSIX often observes that companies survey the customers who successfully complete the journey, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy that reassures the business has driven a superior customer experience, when it has not. ?In reality, it's the customers who drop off that hold the key to uncovering where improvements can be made, that's why the PrinSIX platform records every interaction so we can understand those that drop off better, why they drop out, and how to get them back.

To optimise journey conversion means understanding every step in every journey.? Track journey performance and journey outcomes.? Customers who can consistently complete a low friction customer journey to achieve their goal will become engaged advocates of your business.? So make sure they are through continual journey analysis.

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4.???? Do we understand their impact on our business model?

Customer journeys and journey conversion dictate every element of a business’s economic model. Three primary economic drivers—customer acquisition, customer lifetime value (CLV), and cost to serve—are all driven by how well a business manages its customer journeys.?

Each journey contributed differently to the three – it is important to understand how.? Use customer data to connect customer behaviour to your financial performance.? Once connected business change and improvement can iteratively target the areas with the highest potential rewards.

In our experience small changes can make dramatic improvements.? For example, we have seen a 1% improvement in conversion reducing the cost of new customer acquisition by 20%, or 90% reductions in operational overheads by removing the friction that stopped customers self serving.

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And for regulated businesses there is a fifth question –

5.???? How do our journeys influence customer outcomes??

It is the question the FCA has asked by introducing Consumer Duty, and which sits at the core of all other regulators’ priorities.? So regulated businesses must be able to measure the impact of every journey on every customer, individually.? Your customer journey tracking must work in reverse, so outcomes can be connected to actions and activities.?

Businesses struggle to do this because the data required to do it is typically locked in computing log files, presenting huge barriers to access and interpretation.? That’s why the PrinSIX platform records every click, data entry, request, calculation and behaviour made through a customer journey in an easily accessible format, to empower our clients to reconstruct a customer’s unique journey from end to end. ??

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Let PrinSIX help you ask, and answer, these critical questions

We love helping our clients answer them, because what we find is exciting – undiscovered journeys, unknown barriers and unexpected customer needs that reveal the true customer experience.? They always reveal enormous potential for commercial improvement.? Findings are rarely marginal, always driving increased profitability quickly

The answers to these questions are already inside your business.? They are in your business data, and inside your operational teams.? Your data may be hard to access, distributed across silos, in different formats, and difficult to join up.? Your business may be complex, and your customers may have diverse needs.? That just makes the benefits of optimising customer journeys bigger.? Let PrinSIX help? ?