Do you sometimes have the best experience with a company’s call center representative and then have the worst experience on its sales floor? Would you give your overall experience with this company a five-star rating just because you had one amazing interaction with them on one touchpoint? No, you wouldn’t. All you can remember is this — “my experience with this company is painful.”
This article by David Edelman, McKinsey partner leading Digital Marketing Strategy Practice, detailed his service experience with his mobile phone company when his phone failed to work internationally. While multiple calls with customer service lead to a satisfactory outcome, his overall experience with the service in general was not, which caused dissatisfaction with the brand.
Edelman’s conclusion? The only way companies can win in today’s world is to win the customer journey. Customers don’t have interactions with brand “touchpoints.” Rather, they embark on a journey with a brand where they have multiple interactions to achieve a specific goal – whether to install a service or use a product. He lists three important implications to becoming a journey organization:
- Organize for journeys. Instead of functioning in silos, pull together teams of people across functions to understand their roles in the context of the overall journey and develop new ways to manage it.
- Create incentives for journeys. Create incentives tailored to specific journeys your brand has identified as important. Back-office employees, for example, should be rewarded for the accuracy of order tickets rather than just the number of them. Customer service personnel should have incentives for identifying root cause issues when customers call. Essentially, all those involved in a given journey should be rewarded for the completion of a successful journey.
- Measure journeys. Dashboards and metrics need to measure the entire journey with an emphasis on those journeys that matter the most (to the customer and the business) and identify them.
What customers are seeking is a smooth journey — one that takes them from one channel to another without any friction. Stop breaking down your customer experience by channels and create a successful Customer Journey Map that will leave customers satisfied and keep them coming back.