A Dramatic Shift in Customer Experience via Journey Mapping

Quite often organizations do not have a real handle on the reasons that customers leave them. It is easy to become enamored with your own products and services. When customers leave it’s painful for everyone.  This is a case study of one companies approach to creating customer experience (CX) journey maps to help identify opportunities for relational improvements and better outcomes.

The Challenge:

A financial services company, began to experience unexpected attrition with new customers.  The company, seeking to rectify the situation, considered investing in additional Customer Service training, technology and process improvement to address customer needs better.  A consulting organization was engaged to assist their efforts to identify the real root cause of the problem.

The Solution:

The approach leveraged a unique approach to Customer Experience (CX) Strategy and Journey Mapping.  Interviews were held with key internal leaders and all stakeholders that had direct interaction with the customer, including sales, partners, legal, customer service, training, IT/web and more. Leveraging internal insights, 50 customers were interviewed, as well as additional customers surveyed, to better understand the holistic end-to-end experience.  All customer touchpoints were identified and a holistic CX Journey Map was developed in a joint workshop with the client to visually depict all of the touchpoints the customer had with the company, as well as touchpoints the customer had with third parties (competitors, social media, blogs, news, etc.) that influenced their perception and experience with our client.

The Insights:

Internal insights revealed a very reactive relationship with the customer, as well as a single channel approach to servicing customer accounts.  Customers highlighted the current interactions as limited, with an efficient process handling unpleasant and often negative interactions. Customers consistently mentioned a lack of understanding around the overall process, including when they would receive specific benefits they had been promised. The interactions reflected a high level of customer effort, as they were forced into a single channel (phone) that was not always preferred or easy to use. Further analysis showed while the company’s interactions were mainly reactive, competitors and other interested parties were interacting with the company’s customers constantly, negatively impacting the customer’s view of the value of the services they had just purchased. It was also uncovered that the quality monitoring of partners was inadequate to prevent low quality sales and inappropriate customer expectations.

The Results:

A future state Customer Experience Journey Map was developed to reflect the environment customers wanted to leverage, including new channels such as self-service, chat, significantly improved education materials (available online) and more. New, proactive touchpoints were implemented to provide timely information to clients. A quality program was implemented to ensure partners and employees understood and properly communicated benefits and expectations to clients. As a result of these efforts, retention increased 13% in 3 months with an associated increase in revenue and increased CSAT scores across the board.  Call volume dropped as interactions were moved to the other, more efficient channels opened, yielding double digit cost savings.  Solution and results summarized below.

Net; Net:

It’s easy to throw money at bad processes and educating your workers, but before you pull that trigger, it’s important to get a handle on the real situation from your customer’s perspective.

This is a highly summarized and anonymous case study provided by Major Oak Consulting; a Verint Company.

 Additional Reading:

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-dangerous-disconnect-between.html

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/01/process-management-providing-better.html

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/01/get-real-customer-care-and-stop-lip.html