customer journey

Every time you choose a model like e.g. a business model canvas or a customer journey you are choosing which information is important to you and which information is not.

e.g. if you map a customer journey for a trip from home to work using public transport you are saying that how many buss drivers there are is not a part of your problem to solve, or that you don’t need to calculate in the scarcity of busses, cost of fuel or the city’s traffic or noise pollution regulations.

In last week’s post, I wrote about some findings in Salesforce’s latest State of the Connected Customer report. One of the graphics for the first finding, “customer connections are essential,” stood out to me. The title of the chart is, “Amid Crises, Experience Remains a Key Differentiator.” I agree with that. It’s the sub-title that struck me: “The Experience a Company Provides Is as Important as Its Products or Services.”

I had to pause a moment. Aren’t products and services part of the experience?

Yes!

Understanding the difference between customer experience and customer service will save you money in your contact center!

There’s a quote (which I may have evolved over the years) from Chris Zane, founder of Zane’s Cycles, that goes like this: “Customer service is what happens when the experience breaks down.”

It’s a great quote for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it nicely differentiates “customer experience” and “customer service,” which people often confuse to be one and the same. Not so.

I originally wrote today's post for Story of Business. It appeared on their blog on August 3, 2018.

Stories are a wonderful communication tool and a powerful teaching tool. They allow you to deliver a message in a way that engages the audience, helps them understand the characters in play, and, hopefully, inspires them. People tend to connect to stories and, therefore, remember them and the message they convey.

Let's put the "customer" into customer experience.

What does that mean?

If you’re a customer of any business on this planet, no surprise here, you know this: most companies are not really focusing on the customer and the customer experience. They might be giving it lip service, but that’s not the same as actually doing the work, understanding the customer, and designing a great customer experience as a result.

What is customer understanding? And how can you achieve it?

Are you adding data to your journey maps?

Back in 2015, I wrote a post titled Hey! You Got Your Metrics in My Journey Map!In it, I advocated for mappers to add data to their journey maps. I wrote that... 
 

The customer experience profession has a lot of buzzwords.

Did you know that data is a critical component of your journey maps?