Why you need to engineer customer paths

Stand in a book shop or browse the Kindle store and you’ll see a multitude of business books about building a great company culture. I’ve read a lot of them. But why is your company’s culture so important? In a nutshell, if you have a bad culture, your business stands a high chance of failing. A big part of every business’s culture is determined by the people working in and leading the organization.

It’s only in a small percentage of cases that the leadership has actively defined the culture they want, and in even less cases, has gone on to implement it. Implementing culture is not about supplying beers, or sending inspirational emails. Unless one of the values you’re trying to instill in people is that drinking is necessary for fun and relaxation. There are some common cultural pillars that many companies list, such as innovation or collaboration. Anything that ends in -ation, really. Don’t get me wrong – These are great behaviours to instill in employees. It’s just that by listing them on a poster, you don’t magically get innovative or collaborative employees.

No, it takes a huge amount of hard work and it means that you need to put initiatives in place to ensure you are innovative. For example, reserving time for employees to learn and try new things every week. Or having a quarterly workshop where you completely scrap current process and rebuild it, teaching methodologies like design thinking. There are hundreds of things you can do to ensure innovation is a pillar your company lives by.

MPULL doesn’t help companies define and implement culture, so besides the fact that it’s a passion of mine, why am I writing about it?

The journeys that customers, employees and channel partners travel along on a daily basis function in the same way as culture. If you don’t define the desired journey you want them to go along, and then implement it and continually reinforce it, then customers, employees and partners will end up creating their own journeys, you will have no control over them and they will probably result in a less-than-optimal experience.

Have you defined a journey for when you have new channel partners join your organization?

I often hear companies complain that their channel partners are selling incorrectly, or don’t understand your brand and are losing deals to your competitors who have inferior products. But when I ask, there is no formal onboarding journey to bring new channel partners up to speed, and there is definitely no program in place for when channel partners hire new employees.

Have you defined a journey to get subscription-based customers to renew their contract with you?

I subscribe to many products and services, and have never experienced an awesome renewal journey. I subscribed to a surfing magazine, and got one reminder a month before my subscription was up for renewal, and then I assume the several calls I rejected from a private number were in fact a call centre trying to get me to renew. I tried to renew my subscription, but the website didn’t have an option to renew. It only had an option to take out a new subscription and when I tried to fill out the form, it told me I was already in the database.

So there I was, trying to forge a path to become a customer again, but I was lost. And as a result, they lost a customer. The moral of my story? Define and implement journeys for your customers, employees and channel partners. Whether they’re acquisition journeys, customer service, welcome, upsell, engagement or repurchase journeys. If you don’t, these journeys will still happen, but instead of travelling on a pleasant tarred road, your audience will be left wandering through the Amazon, sinking into quicksand and dodging jaguars at every corner. Talk about a detour.