CX: are you a good photographer or an expert cinematographer?

Tuesday, Jun 28th 2022
Shot of a group of colleagues having a brainstorming session in a modern office

As CCM (Customer Communication Management) and CX (Customer Experience) intersect, it is important to put CCM into the context of CX. Think of it as making a movie. Each CCM project requires the attention to detail of an expert cinematographer. Every great chain of customer experiences - the continuity and interest of such experiences must be managed by a brilliant director. As CCM and CX converge, it is important for CX versions of these roles to work together to make larger, more cohesive project that delivers on a larger vision.

As we look at the concept of Customer Journey Mapping to better understand your customers, there are 6 key principles to capture your customers’ behavior. Let’s take a look at these key principles:

  • Empower your employees: By doing so, you might discover that something is wrong in your system before the customer discovers the problem. You may identify a failed business process, a new service from a competitor, or an easy opportunity to remove an unnecessary step. Employees from all parts of the business can improve customer experiences. Some of the best improvements come from; frontline agents, salespeople, managers, call center representatives and IT experts. Employees echo the “Voice of the Customer,” because they hear it every day.
  • Listen to your customers: It’s important to capture the feelings of customers who bought your products. We think it’s even more important to understand why they didn’t buy your products. Is their decision due to an obstacle in the business process? Is it a lack of information? Is it a delay which forced the customer to find an alternative? Sending a simple survey right after the interaction with the customer will give you valuable insights.
  • Be a step ahead on social media: Customers have the choice to surf the internet, look for advice on a forum, and share their experiences on social media. On average they research 10 products before selecting the right one for them. You don’t want your prospects to get a bad impression of your company because of comments found on the Web. As a CX focused organization, you need to be ahead of the game, and take care of communications outside of your perimeter (i.e. external conversations). You have the right to reply in forums, you have the capability to officially answer your customers on social media. A customer who faces an issue is more willing to forgive your mistake when given a personal response.
  • Map the unknown: Your marketing might be working in unexpected ways. Document what you find as soon as you learn about an unexpected communication. Maybe you had an email campaign that is getting forwarded to the friends of the original recipient. You might not know why it is happening, but you better place it on your customer journey map. You and your team will investigate and decide if it impacts your business.
  • Optimize your communication channels: Let’s assume you are a customer-centric organization, and communicate effectively across all channels. Do you have the correct systems in place, the communication platform in place to address all communication channels with only one source of information to remain consistent across all channels? It’s about time to ask yourself what you need to support your actions and improve customer experience on all channels at any time. Do you have a consolidated view on your customer’s journeys? Do you measure how the satisfaction evolves?  Are you able to set achievable goals in terms of CX?
  • Iterate to be great: Let’s assume you have reached the point where everything has been mapped, you have the business process in place, you have the team to answer to your customers on all channels, you are proactive, you are transparent, and you measure progress in valuable ways. There is one more thing to do: keep all projects connected to the larger portfolio of experiences. Always be willing to modify your maps with new learnings, add new metrics when you see value, and direct your investments into projects that improve customer experience. Don’t assume this is done once and it’s good forever. The world is moving fast, the customers get more informed over time and technology speeds things up. So Iterate! Iterate! Iterate! This is an on-going challenging attitude to keep the picture focused and crystal clear.

The individual scenes that make up a Customer Journey should be beautiful, but putting them together in support of a broader vision will increase the value of your efforts. You can be a part of the masterpiece that is “CX improvement” with a supporting role screen credit going to GMC Software’s Customer Journey Mapping cloud app.