Pillar 1

Listen: Measuring the customer journey

Pillar 1 - Listen

At any one time, your customers are either disappointed or delighted by your service. If you measure their sentiment—for instance, in a survey—you'll paint a picture of how they are feeling in the moment. But it won’t tell you much more than that.

Think of it like a doctor measuring your blood pressure. It’s simply a measure
of your BP at one specific point in time. You might have been rushed or
stressed about getting to the appointment. Maybe you just came from a
yoga class. Either way, one reading isn’t going to tell your doctor much
about your overall health.

Customer experience measurement needs to take into account the entirety of the customer journey. There’s no magic moment that you can identify to ensure a repeat customer. Even if their ordering experience is smooth, you can lose them with a delayed delivery. The customer support might be excellent, but if the product is defective, they’re unlikely to return.

Instead of assigning importance to one specific moment, companies need to understand the entire journey to accurately predict and impact customer loyalty. And that means looking across multiple channels as well.

Consider the definition of customer experience provided in the introduction:

Customer experience is the delta between the customer’s expectations, and the performance a company delivers.

That delta changes over time. At any point in the customer journey, you can determine whether a customer’s expectations are being met, and by how much. The sum of these deltas helps you understand whether the customer’s overall experience is positive or negative.

To improve the total customer experience, it’s essential to document the customer’s journey, both from a customer’s perspective and from an operational perspective. Customer experience must be measured over the lifetime of the customer in order to be accurate, predictable, and actionable. Today some companies run a one-off journey mapping exercise which ends up as a poster on a wall, and is soon out of sight, out of mind for most teams in the building. Instead, companies to can develop a living, breathing, and evolving journey online, which can be linked to a dashboard providing actionable insights that teams want to use. This enables teams to collaborate towards driving real improvements on a continuous basis.

In the next section, we take a brief look at customer journey maps and
how you can start developing your own.

Organizations with a cross-team CX approach were
nearly twice as likely to have exceeded their
top business goals (20% vs. 11%)

Source: Adobe

Journey maps are first developed from the customer’s perspective. Companies must put themselves in their customers' shoes to identify potential touchpoints. This is a common mistake companies make when developing their first journey map. They make a list of the existing customer experience programs they have, and assume customers will interact through those channels. But that’s not a realistic view of the true customer experience.

Second, a journey map must be omnichannel-wide and organization-wide. A common mistake for teams developing a journey map is to do so in isolation (perhaps on a retreat or workshop day). But one department won’t be able to identify every meaningful touchpoint, as much as they think they can. Without input from every department, the journey map will be biased towards one team’s perspective (e.g., marketing, services, or product). Inviting every team into the process will create a well-rounded CEM program with full investment from everyone in the business. In fact, Adobe’s 2018 Digital Trends report found that “organizations with a cross-team CX approach were nearly twice as likely to have exceeded their top business goals (20% vs. 11%).”

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a blueprint of all the interactions a customer has
with a brand. Mapping out a customer’s journey provides businesses with a visualization of all the touchpoints where they have influence over the
customer experience.

Finally, journey maps from the CEM perspective must wear a dual lens, focusing on both the experience that the business intends to provide, and the experience that the customer actually ends up receiving. The gap between these two identifies the point where the experience either breaks down or delights. This gap then becomes the point of action for the brand moving forward.

Developing a customer journey map

Bringing stakeholders from across the company together to create a customer journey map is one of the most impactful exercises in CEM. It’s not a one-time exercise, or even done in an afternoon. Creating a living document that delineates the possible customer journeys takes time and iteration. However, the process is straightforward, once you know how to get started. Here’s how:

Find the touchpoints
Record all customer interactions from the first point of contact. This might consist of user interviews to understand how they view each interaction.
Define stages of interaction
Identify clear start and end points for each interaction to group touchpoints into event stages. For example, public relations, a TV advertisement, and
an in-store banner would all be part of an “awareness” stage in a customer journey map.
Organize stages into a journey
Using the stages defined in step 2, recreate the customer journey from the point of view of an individual customer, clarifying the activities they
undertake during that stage.
List touchpoints at each stage
For each stage in the journey, outline the interactions a customer has
with the brand using the recorded touchpoints.
Understand feedback opportunities
Identify the opportunities for feedback or experience measurement at
each stage. What surveys or data points are available to measure what
the customer feels? Were their goals achieved?
Create the customer journey
Finally, reconstruct the journey map from the brand’s perspective.
What is the intended experience at each touchpoint?

Revisit customer journey mapping exercises frequently to ensure all interactions are mapped correctly. If data is being collected that doesn’t fit into the current model (i.e., new surveys, new products or new feedback), it’s time to assess and modify the existing model.

What to include in a journey map

The end result needs to include not only how a customer feels
(i.e., survey results) but also what a customer is actually doing
(i.e., time spent in the mobile app). Here’s a list of
what you might include in a customer journey:

Marketing interactions (social, ads, etc.)
Subscribed to a newsletter
Downloaded marketing material
Signed up for a free trial
Logged into an app for first time
Sales call
Walked into retail store
Product demo
Signed up for a product
First invoice
Onboarding steps completed
Kick-off call with customer success
First purchase
Order delivered
Left review online
Contacted support
Filled out NPS survey
Returned product
Recommended to friend
Cancelled account
Attended a webinar

Not all customer journeys are the same

Different cohorts of customers might have radically different customer journeys. For example, consider a retailer like Nordstrom, which that sells products online and in physical stores. It may divide its customer journey mapping into three different cohorts:

Online customers
only ever purchase through its website
In-store customers
only purchase in Nordstrom stores
Blended customers
purchase both in store and online (a tricky cohort!)

Rather than trying to lump all customers in together, it’s much more effective and actionable to create multiple macro journeys. This can be useful later when developing marketing automation and proactive customer service experiences based on intelligent cohorts.

Understanding micro journeys

Most companies create a single macro journey map across all points of interaction, but that’s not how every customer experiences the journey. From an experience design perspective, it’s important to note that not all journeys, are equal or linear. Customers wander through a number of “micro journeys” skipping, revisiting, and changing the sequence of their interactions across the touchpoints. Their expectations of these touchpoints are dependent on the context of the journey they encountered them in.

For example, for a retail clothing brand, the path to purchase is unique. A customer might have tried on a piece in the store, saw an advertisement online, and then gone back in the store to purchase. The customer expectations out of each touchpoint are different in each situation. Having the right sizes in store to purchase, being correctly targeted for online advertisements, and having a well-staffed checkout counter all factored into the overall journey. But these touchpoints might have impacted another journey differently.

To truly understand the influence of each touchpoint on an individual customer, companies need to understand the context of the interaction. Managing experiences through the lens of multiple micro journeys allows for companies to see the big picture—and to make decisions accordingly.

Summary of
Pillar 1 - Listen

The customer experience needs to be measured using the customer journey to identify touchpoints and brand
interactions where the company can have an impact.

To create an accurate customer journey map, companies
need to involve stakeholders and data points from across
the entire company.

Identifying different customer cohorts produces multiple customer journey maps. This makes it more effective for companies to personalize their marketing activities.

The customer’s experience with a touchpoint depends
on the context they encounter it in. This is why companies
must identify and understand the multiple micro journeys encompassed by their macro journey map.