The emphasis of organizations today is to elevate their customers’ experiences at every touchpoint of their customer’s journey. And to understand and enhance these interactions the fundamental starting point is to identify those transactions and comprehend where those interactions take place. Since these interactions often change the customer’s perception of the brand, it’s extremely important to understand them and strive to improve them. Therefore it’s crucial to elevate engagement in individual transactions at various parts of business offerings.
Traditional touchpoint approach Vs. comprehensive journey mapping
The traditional approach is to identify, understand measure and improve these individual interactions. This method is beneficial as it aligns all the touchpoints into the operations, which helps in monitoring and tracking these interactions. Although this is traditionally followed by a majority of companies, it has a major drawback, which is that threatens to destroy all efforts at establishing unified Omni-channel customer support services. The reason being that touchpoints measured in isolation can give misleading results, because it puts every interaction into a silo and fails to give a comprehensive picture.
The overall customer satisfaction levels may be good, still, a large part of the customers might feel that they’ve been given poor customer service. For example, the customer might not be bothered by how one E-mail interaction might have been dealt with, or how someone spoke to them on chat. But what they do care about is the total of all these experiences and how their customer journey was with the company over time. When the focus is to only deal with problems in a siloed manner and not as part of a comprehensive journey it might lead to a root cause problem going undiscovered.
Hence what companies should do is identify the nature of customer’s journeys, and understand how they can navigate through this. They must see the journey through the eyes of a customer by analysing what happens before, during and after a service/product is delivered. Examining these contextual situations help organizations create a seamless end-end experience.
Importance of context in customer experience
Context is hence one of the key differentiators of seamless customer experience. A unified customer journey experience directly correlates with faster revenue growth and customer satisfaction. Since companies are traditionally wired to think about individual touchpoints, thinking about the whole of the customer’s journey might require a shift in culture and how operations function & interact. Companies that master this shift get better customer loyalty, satisfaction & an edge over their competitors.
When there is a lack of synergy in managing various touchpoints, there’s a constant risk of losing sight of what the customer desires. An analysis of their journey gives insight into the cumulative effect of the customer experience strategy. In a world where customers interact through multiple channels and various touchpoints, providing consistent services becomes integral.
And this can be done by a comprehensive analysis of all touchpoints. Although each touchpoint indeed delivers crucial and actionable insights, what companies need to solve for is the customer’s entire experience journey and not just individual transactions. Hence to provide a seamlessly integrated customer experience, cut down end-end service cost companies need to step out of their traditional siloed thinking and view individual interactions as part of one big picture.
