VOC, Journey Mapping, Unified Customer Experiences, and More

On the lighter side...

CX Highlight

Daymond John , CEO of FUBU and Shark Tank star, interviews a business owner at his stand outside of the Apollo Theater. It showcases that great customer experiences begin with simple, core principles. Watch his interview here.

Improving (or Starting) Your Voice of the Customer Program?

How is your voice of the customer program? Or maybe you don't even have one?

If your program is struggling, don't worry, you aren't alone. According to Colleen Fazio at Forrester, just 12% of customer experience (CX) pros give their voice of the customer program a maturity rating of high or very high.

She discusses how to improve VOC programs on the What It Means podcast.

The skinny: Today's programs are "survey obsessed." You should "do less seeking and more finding." Start with your contact center. You don't need to be fancy or big. Start small to get the ball rolling, and make big gains by closing the loop with customers. Their "research shows that just reaching out can reduce churn by double digits."

Listen to the full episode here with lots of tips and tricks: https://lnkd.in/ermqK4fF.

Unified Customer Experiences

Savneet Singh, CEO of PAR Technology, writes at Forbes about how unified customer experiences “enhance brand awareness, strengthen customer relationships, and drive sales.” Customers today interact with brands across channels - in-store, online, mobile, phone, social, and more. For instance, we have all probably experienced:?

• A restaurant where the server and food are top notch, but the required process to order on your smartphone is glitchy, slow, and frustrating
• An online ordering process that is nearly frictionless, but the shipper delivers it to the wrong address or has a limited tracking system
• A store’s app says the item is in-stock, but they don’t have it when you arrive at the store

Savneet shares how you can up your CX game to give the customer the best possible experience every place they interact with you.

Making a Customer Journey Map the Right Way

It’s almost impossible to manage your customer’s journey and your customer’s experience if the process that’s being followed differs from how it’s supposed to be. When your customers are having a different lived experience to the one you think they are, this is confusing. It skews all your data and makes it very difficult to make any decisions on how to improve.

Critical to managing your customer’s journey and experience is accurately knowing their journey. If your assumptions are wrong, it skews the data. You need to make sure you aren’t “doing it in a way that tells you what you think you know.” Instead, you need to ensure your own biases/assumptions don’t get in the way. While specific to call centers, this post lays out 10 useful tips for everyone:?

1. A customer journey map is not the same as a process map
2. Workshops are the best way to map out your customer journey
3. Your workshops need to include multiple points of view
4. Decide on the appropriate level of detail
5. How to bring in the customer point of view to find and fix your points of failure
6. You need to use customer personas
7. Remember to replicate success as well as uncovering points of failure
8. The importance of measuring Customer Effort
9. How to get the scope right
10. Have the right mindset – don’t be scared of bad news

Doing Customer Off-boarding Right

Do you spend time focusing on a quality customer off-boarding process? If you answered no, you are far from alone. As ?Shep Hyken discusses in this article, “What most companies don’t do is spend time at the end of the customer’s journey, off-boarding them to understand why they are leaving, what might be done to keep them, and getting feedback to help them be better for future customers. In other words, the customer off-boarding process is typically neglected.” Shep shared four ideas from his recent interview with Tony Sternberg on the Amazing Business Radio podcast:

1. Get feedback as the customer leaves you.?
2. Track your customer’s cadence. If you know the patterns of your best customers and your worst customers, you might be able to spot changes that indicate a customer is moving towards leaving.?
3. AI and automation can help you retain customers.? But sometimes a personal, human-to-human outreach is needed.
4. Focus on acquisition and retention. Retention is key to growth so that your sales funnel isn’t like a hamster wheel - lots of spinning, but not going anywhere. Remember, it is far less expensive to retain customers than acquire new ones.

And, of course, when a customer does leave, but it was a good offboarding process, it can leave the door open for future opportunities.?

Read the full article here.?

TheyDo Raises €12M

Journey management company TheyDo - Journey Management strives to “connect people, processes, and products - and turn them into opportunities for CX improvements - all across your customer journeys.” They are right - it is more than mapping and looking at it holistically is critical. TheyDo integrates with Qualtrics to integrate CX data from Qualtrics into Journey Management. Read TechCrunch’s article about the cash infusion and where TheyDo sees their solution helping companies improve their customer experience.?

We will be at X4!?

Will we see you at the X4 Summit in Utah in March? We sure hope so. We have some fun (and useful) stuff planned!

From the Blog

• How to Implement Journey-Centric Marketing
• How can AI Impact Customer Experience

About

CXLUED IN is a weekly resource for the latest news, tips, and strategies for improving customer experiences (CX). It is brought to you as a free service by Farlinium, LLC, a @Qualtrics XM preferred partner. Subscribe here on LinkedIn to be notified each week when a new issue is published.?

If you have any feedback or want to send us other useful content for us to include, drop us a line at [email protected].