A CUSTOMER CENTRIC ORGANIZATION: From touchpoint thinking

to journey thinking

Another interesting Möbius Insight

This isn’t an easy task as most organizations are traditionally built around customer touchpoints instead of journeys. Thinking about customer journeys instead of single interactions requires an operational and cultural shift.

In this paper, we provide some examples and elaborate on our overall approach to shift your

organization from touchpoint thinking to journey thinking.

A customer journey includes all actions a customer undertakes before, during and

after his or her experience with your product or service. A journey stretches across multiple channels and touchpoints and can last days or weeks. Organizations that offer a good to greatexperience from start to finish along each journey attain higher customer satisfaction, improve sales and customer retention, reduce end-to-end service cost, and strengthen employee satisfaction. This is especially true in today’s complex, multichannel, real-time, hypercompetitive consumer markets. The explosion of customer interaction points across channels, devices, applications, and more makes consistency of service and experience across channels almost impossible, unless you are

managing the journey, and not simply individual touchpoints.

McKinsey research has shown that companies that perform best on journeys have a more

distinct competitive advantage than those that excel at touchpoints. Journeys are a better indicator for business outcomes. Performance on journeys is substantially more strongly correlated with customer satisfaction than performance on touchpoints. And performance on journeys is significantly more strongly correlated with business outcomes such as revenue, churn, and repeat purchase.

In other words, you should focus and organize your business around the overall customer experience.

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INSIGHT

CUSTOMERJOURNEYS MATTER

____________________

Read our related blog “It’s the experience, stupid!”

Here’s a practical example which might look familiar. A service company was losing

business to the competition although the company’s customer satisfaction metrics were strong. Focus groups revealed a large number of customers left because of poor service over time. This insight came as a surprise as service was always perceived as great, based on available customer satisfaction indicators in the call centers, field services and web experience.

By probing further, the researchers found a more complex problem. Most customers weren’t unhappy about any phone calls, field visits, or other individual service interactions. In fact, they didn’t much care about those singular interactions. What was driving them to competitors was the lack of consistency and personalization across touchpoints and channels over time.

PRACTICAL EXAMPLE - How touchpoints fail

We still see a lot of organizations focusing on touchpoints, namely the individual transactions through which they interact with customers. Each department is accountable for its touchpoints and ensures customers are happy with their respective interactions: product purchase, customer service, after sales support,... Although this approach is quite logical, it misses the bigger and more important picture: the customer’s end-to-end experience. Only by looking at the customer’s overall experience along the entire journey, you can start to understand how to improve customer and business performance. Customer journeys have become key for winning organizations. They are the baseline on your path towards true customer centricity.

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change his mindset from reactive product pusher to proactive solution spotter.

Understanding and dedication

The new story of Liantis is completely focussed on understanding its customer along the

customer journey. The customer journeys and service blueprints enable employees to proactively provide packed solutions as one company across different business units.

Möbius not only helped us with the necessary structures, but also served as a customer focused gatekeeper. To make sure the customer always comes first.

Nicolas Maes - Marketing Director

Liantis is very dedicated to its new service and even appointed a CX (Customer Experience)

designer, making sure everyone always maintains the best service quality.

Compagnon de route

Liantis wants to be a journey companion that thinks ahead of its customers at any time,

proactively giving the right advice and providing suitable solutions. This means that each employee must understand the strategic challenges of their customers and support them with specific services. It’s a great and promising concept, but it requires a specific set of skills to develop. That’s why Liantis asked Möbius to support them in defining customer journeys and developing a solution catalog.

As a company we want to be a ‘compagnon the route’ for our customers. It’s our ambition to truly connect with customers and provide the right solutions at the right time.

Nicolas Maes - Marketing Director

From pusher to spotter

We started with defining a project team, consisting of experts from different

business units. After presenting our vision, we identified buyer persona’s and customer lifecycles for businesses, freelancers and employees.

For each strategic challenge within these lifecycles, a customer journey was defined representing customer steps, needs, satisfaction and the appropriate solutions from all units in the organization. These results were consolidated in a solution catalog.

We want to understand our customers, follow their journey and grasp their challenges and frustrations. Together with Möbius we were able to map out these customer journeys and generate all the right information.

Nicolas Maes - Marketing Director

Afterwards, service blueprints were drafted to translate customer requirements into operational processes. Finally, a plan was created to communicate our results to the employee and

7

CASE

DEVELOPING THE PERFECT CUSTOMER JOURNEY WITH LIANTIS

ADMB, Zenito and Provikmo joined forces to form a new organization called Liantis. It was created as a one-stop-shop for all customers – from contractor to accountant, from hospital director to machine operator. With a fresh take on customer journey engagement and understanding.

Historically, our number-one growth

driver has been from repeat cus-

tomers and word of mouth.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

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“ “ “

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1. Sell More to Current Customers.As customer aficionados, we all know our current customers are our most lucrative asset. Taking care of current customers is crucial as it costs 10 times more to attract a new customer than to upsell a current one. Focusing on the customer needs starts with senior management. Jeff Bezos created an obsession about customers at Amazon. This emphasis was brought to life by Bezos bringing an empty chair into meetings. The empty chair represented the customer. The message was clear, the current customer was always top of mind and seen as the most important person in the room.

2. Exceed Expectations. Give your most loyal customers more than expected by going the extra mile. Walt Disney was a big believer of exceeding expectations to enhance customer retention. He called it “plussing” the experience.

3. Convenience. Take an outside-in view by mapping the customer journey and assess the convenience of your customers.

4. Think value, not price. Compete on the value you offer to customers, price is relative. An airline company made a bald move. When every other airline decided to charge for checked baggage, this airline estimated that wasn’t fair and created a program “Bags Fly Free”, with success.

5. Experience is an Investment. Giving something extra isn’t an expense, it bolsters your brand. A good example is Zappos, CEO Tony Hsieh and his team built a billion dollar business by selling shoes online. They did it largely without spending any money on traditional media. Instead, Zappos invested back into its customers by doing the little extras. The extras included free shipping both ways, overnight shipping upgrades, a 365-day return policy and top-notch customer service.

INSIGHT

5 CUSTOMER CENTRICLESSONS

5 lessons from winning customer centric organizations:

Our philosophy is delivering happiness to customers and employees. People may not

remember exactly what you did or what you said, but

they always remember how you made them feel.

Tony Hsieh, CEO at Zappos

“

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Source: Forbes

roadmap for the future. What will you need to do differently to realize ideal journeys? Which changes are needed to current operations, channels and systems?

• Inject insights: Metrics matter and help you monitor and improve both customer and employee experience.

• Align your culture: In the end, people are what matter. How do you align every executive and employee? How do you create the case for sustainable change?

Learn more about each of these transformation components further on in this paper.

Truly listen and understand your customersWalk the customer talk

Walk the customer talk is about understanding how your customers

behave, how they interact with your organization and what they need and expect along their journey. The available customer intelligence and research data should also help you define customer behaviour that creates value for your business.

Start by mapping the customer journeys, identify the current pains and gains along the journey. Identify opportunities to innovate and/or disrupt the experience. While eliminating pain points is important for customers, we believe it is also critical to identify competitive differentiation opportunities.

Consider the following questions:

• Are you offering continuous value throughout the journey or customer lifecycle?

• Are you everywhere, always and real-time?

• Are your experiences effortless? Do they stick? Consider a surprise / wow -effect.

• Are you offering instant/direct satisfaction at some touchpoints?

• Are you personalizing services?

In addition to your inside-out answers on the above question, add voice of the customer

analysis to generate a list of disruptive ideas. Which new products, services, channels, interactions create a unique value for the customer? Focus groups with customers who recently undertook the journey, can help highlight pain points, unmet needs, missed expectations and opportunities.

In addition to customer insights, it is wise to enrich the customer journeys with your current operational data. This will help identify both digital and operational excellence opportunities. For example, which journeys drive a large number of calls and paperwork? Is there any room for automatization? Do you perform consistently throughout the journey? A flawless experience without mistakes or complications, delivering what you promise, remains one of the best ways to deliver value.

We recommend to map and redesign the customer journeys with a multidisciplinary

team, combining functional expertise and frontline employees who know customers best. Once you have identified what matters to customers, you should set your priorities for each important customer journey. These priorities are the base for a customer transformation roadmap.

At Möbius, we developed a holistic approach to help you evolve towards a more mature

customer centric organization. Starting from truly understanding your customers, helping you redesign customer experience, injecting valuable insights to aligning your culture.

Our tailored approach is a unique combination of customer research, proven methodologies, strategic advice, analytics expertise, coaching and innovative thinking. It is built around four components:

INSIGHT

MÖBIUS APPROACH FOR ACUSTOMER CENTRIC TRANSFORMATION

Shifting your organization from touchpoint thinking to journey thinking requires a company-wide approach. A customer journey focus means moving away from transactions. It demands an end-to-end vision, away from functional silo’s.

• Walk the customer talk: Walk the customer talk: at first, we recommend to step back and identify the journeys your customers take. Understand how they interact with your organization across the different touchpoints and anticipate on their needs, expectations and desires throughout each journey. Assess what’s currently working and what’s not. Define improvement opportunities to close the gap between expectations and current experience.

• Reinvent your core: Once you know which journeys matter most for your business outcome, redesign them for a better end-to-end experience. Build a

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Walk the customer talk Reinvent

your core

And embrace your

TRANSFORMATION

Injectinsights

Alignyour culture

Continuousvalue

Everywhere, always and real-time

EffortlessExperiences

that stick

Direct Satisfaction

PersonalizedServices

Enhancing customer experience

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Outside-In & Inside-outReinvent your core

Reinvent your core is about preparing and initiating the shift towards journey

thinking. It is about translating the redesigned customer journeys to your daily operations and systems. At this stage, we recommend the use of service blueprints. Service blueprints show the link between customer actions, touchpoints, processes and systems throughout each journey.

Before engaging more teams to conduct the customer transformation and elaborate on service blueprints, processes and systems, it is

important to define and scope your customer experience program, including your vision and governance.

Key for any successful transformation is an inspiring vision and customer strategy. What is your vision for the ideal customer experience? Which principles, strategy and values do you want your organization to breath and express to customers and employees? How do you translate this vision into a compelling change story?

Define the governance for your cross-functional customer transformation. How

will decisions be made? How will you align and coordinate ongoing initiatives? How will you monitor the transformation? Which objectives and metrics will help you monitor progress?

We recommend to start the transformation cross-functionally by focusing on a specific set of customer journeys. As shown on the above figure, you start from the customer journeys and look at their end-to-end impact on the organization. Which processes and which systems are at play? How will they be impacted by the redesigned journeys? Which actions, initiatives and projects need to be launched to implement the journeys of the future?

When setting priorities, it is important to think both “big AND small”. Choose

initiatives which will quickly lead to tangible and visible results. It is important to create momentum for the program and share early successes. This will get everyone excited about your customer centric vision and will accelerate progress. For example, taking away operational pains throughout the journey are visible quick wins, impacting a large number of customers which will have immediate impact on customer satisfaction. In parallel, it is important to work on more symbolic initiatives which include customer wow moments, touchpoints throughout the journey at which you and your employees can (easily) exceed expectations.

Data is the new oil Inject insights

Inject insights is all about learning from your data to take the right (corrective) actions and

to steer your business. In our journey centric approach, we recommend to collect customer and operational data on journey level. As explained previously in this paper, touchpoint KPI’s can be

misleading as you miss the bigger picture and do not learn about the overall journey experience. Remember, research shows customer journeys are significantly better correlated with business outcomes, such as churn, then are touchpoints. Obtaining feedback about customer journeys - for example the insurance claim handling journey, not just a customer care interaction - becomes crucial.

Most organizations are convinced they should invest in customer experience. But only

a few have clearly identified what an excellent customer experience is worth. Do you know what an increase in net promotor score means for your business? We often see a loss of confidence in the data amongst both managers and employees due to a disconnect between the metrics and business performance. This means the metrics model in place isn’t right. Which metrics should we choose, transactional or relational measures? How does customer satisfaction relate to operational KPI’s? How does customer performance relate to employee performance?

A smart combination of metrics provides INSIGHTS on customer level, but even more

important is to INJECT these insights into your daily business. Do you have a system and culture in place to loop customer feedback to frontline employees? Do you connect customer feedback with your innovation – and operational excellence teams? To become truly customer centric, the voice of the customer should be present at all times. Winning organizations have a system in place that enables to collect, analyze and act on feedback to continuously improve their customer journeys. We recommend to collect and loop customer feedback for each (important) customer journey.

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____________________Read our related blog “NPS, a simple metric, but what’s next?”Read more on how NPS and eNPS go hand in hand, about great employee experiences and the importance of the Employee Effort Score.

A Belgian utility installed a customer feedback system to spread and foster

their customer centric culture. An automated platform was used to send-out surveys, analyze and report customer feedback within the organization. For the first time, customer feedback was accessible not only to marketing – and research teams but to all

frontline employees. Next to an automated customer feedback system, the utility installed a continuous improvement mindset that encouraged employees to close the loop with their customers. This led to higher employee engagement, better customer experiences, more loyalty and even a lower cost to serve.

PRACTICAL EXAMPLE - Customer feedback at a Belgian utility In addition to pairing operational KPI’s to journey feedback, we strongly believe in the cultural impact of customer feedback. By sharing customer feedback and closing the loop on a company-wide scale, we see a positive impact on employee engagement. Not only does customer feedback help and motivate employees to better serve/perform, it also makes them feel closer to customers and the company’s purpose. Hence, we notice a positive correlation between the customer NPS and the employee NPS.

People are what matters Align your culture

Align your culture is about assigning dedicated customer experience team(s)

and fostering a customer centric mindset. In order to successfully shift from touchpoint thinking to journey thinking, you will need cross functional customer experience teams that take responsibility to monitor and improve the customer experience on journey level. These teams put the customer’s perspective at the center of the organization and require all parts of the organization to work closely together. The

role and responsibility of these teams should be clearly defined. Effective customer experience teams provide voice of the customer insights, identify customer experience improvement opportunities and support customer journey performance. A seamless customer experience along each journey is their ultimate goal.

In order to facilitate cross-silo activity and collaboration, the customer experience teams should be directly supported by the CEO. The CEO must make customer experience an active priority, given the cross-functional collaboration required. Assigning a Chief Customer Experience Manager or Chief Customer Officer (CXM or CCO) with direct access to the CEO is a proven and effective practice.

Once you have dedicated customer experience teams in place with direct C-level support, the

use of customer metrics enables cross-functional collaboration. As outlined previously, injecting customer feedback paired with operational performance indicators at journey level, shows your employees how they are directly impacting the customer experience. Continuous voice of the customer works as a lever to enhance both employee and customer satisfaction.

TO CONCLUDE

Disney, one of the most successful customer centric organizations, leads by example.

Customer centricity has always been a top priority at C-level.

Disney has never steered solely on financial KPI’s. Customer satisfaction measures such as “likelihood to return” and “likelihood to recommend” have always been monitored and linked to business results. These two customer

satisfaction metrics are widely spread and known within the organization. Disney’s management also emphasizes that the way to satisfy customers is through engaged employees. For Disney’s business leaders, the logic is clear: their task is to develop excellent employees, who in turn help to create satisfied customers, leading to great business results.

CASE - Customer centricity at Disney

Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.

Walt Disney

““

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Evolving towards a customer centric organization, by shifting from touchpoint

thinking to journey thinking can be challenging. In this paper we shared our approach to guide you towards customer excellence. To wrap up: here are some key learnings.

Walk the customer talk by mapping and understanding customer journeys. Work with cross-functional teams, involve both frontline employees and customers along the way.

Reinvent your core by identifying pains and gains along each journey as well as white areas for competitive innovation and/or disruption. Prioritize improvement opportunities, translate journeys to processes and systems (service blueprints) and draw a roadmap to implement the re-designed customer journeys.

Inject insights by collecting customer feedback on journey level and tying in operational KPI’s and employee feedback. Share customer feedback and close the loop by engaging frontline employees.

Align your culture by assigning customer experience teams to put the customer’s perspective at the center of your organization.

And remember, winning customer experience organizations start by making customer

experience a top priority for the CEO. Consider Jeff Bezos at Amazon, bringing an empty chair as a symbol for the customer to every board meeting.

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____________________Read our blog about the importance of the Customer Experience ManageRead more about connecting the dots between customer satisfaction and employee engagement

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