The customer journey has grown increasingly complex and difficult to measure. There was a time when most customer service metrics focused on the contact centre. How quickly are the calls answered? Are the customer problems resolved on the first call? How much time do the calls take?

These are all still relevant metrics inside contact centres, but when looking today at the complete customer journey – from initial awareness of a product to being a satisfied customer and advocating for the brand – there are many more touch points and they may involve team members that were not traditionally considered to be a part of the customer service function.

Clearly if you want to put the customer journey at the heart of your customer experience (CX) strategy then you need to understand all the touch points along the way. A satisfied customer telling their friends about your product and a customer reaching out for information because they only just heard about your product are completely different from the traditional post-purchase customer service interactions.

But every interaction at all stages of the customer journey needs to work well and satisfy (or delight) the needs of the customer at that point. I believe there are some key points executives need to keep in mind when planning how to understand this in the modern CX environment:

1. You cannot fix what you don’t understand. Many managers talk about their ability to have a ‘single view of the customer’ yet how many have real insights into potential customers, customers in the process of making a purchase, and existing customers? There is an enormous opportunity in creating the ability to view, measure, and track CX consistently across all the departments in your business – and never forget that customers don’t care about your internal structures, they just interact with your brand.
2. Some departments are better than others. This is a typical problem in many companies. It might be that your marketing team is great at measuring and tracking customer interactions, but the sales team isn’t as effective. You need to be planning for a consistent view of CX across all stages of the customer journey.
3. The journey is complex. Can you take a strategic view on all customer touch points and journey stages with a view on which department ‘owns’ each stage? If you can identify this information, knit it together, and represent the data in a clear, simple, and actionable format, then imagine the power you have to change and improve your business?
4. The ability to create insight. It’s great if you can access all this data on customer behaviour, but you also need to ability to create insight. What are the trends? What are the stages and steps in the journey that directly impact on CX? Can you close the loop by identifying areas that need to be changed and then actually see the impact when changes are implemented?
5. Removing the silo effect. You need all departments that interact with customers to share data and be coordinated. Without this, it’s impossible to completely map and analyse the customer journey from the first effect of the marketing team to sales to customer service. All these teams need to be working together and using the same information on the customer.

This is exactly the kind of challenge that Praxidia enjoys helping its clients to address and we have created solutions to address this need – with many demonstrable case studies. To learn more please leave a comment here or get in touch via my LinkedIn profile.