The Levers to Accelerate your Customer Journey – Brillio | Digital Transformation Solutions

Customer Experience is the new battleground for the digital age businesses.
As per Gartner’s Customer Experience in Marketing Survey, 81% of the marketing heads reported that they would be competing mostly or entirely on the basis of CX by 2020.

What is driving this change? The world is rapidly moving towards the anything-as-a-service (XaaS) model, and no industry or product can stay oblivious to it. Today, you can subscribe to a book to music to a car to a software platform and to even detergent. We are moving away from the “ownership” world to a “personalized-usership” world. In a “usership” world, the experience becomes the deciding factor where multiple products are available at a lower price, delivered faster and are of better quality.

Acceleration of the Customer Journey – from awareness to the advocacy – helps a business deliver superior CX and fiercely compete in the marketplace. In this blog, we will talk about the different levers that help in accelerating this journey.

Lever #1: Customer Journey Map Design and Goal Setting

Behind every excellent customer experience is a well-thought-out customer decision journey map that was designed with an “outside-in” approach and not just based on a tool preference. Note that it is “design” and not define. The design is much broader and ensures that it captures every customer touchpoint from awareness to advocacy. The absence of touchpoints or the moments of truth in your customer journey map reduces it to just a process. Most critical is the fact that the customer journey must be designed based on organizational goals. E.g., Google’s 10X goal is one of the fundamental drivers behind most of the goal setting. It’s necessary to decide and agree upon your goals for the customer journey.

Lever #2: Organizational Structure and Culture

Is your organization rightly structured and aligned with the design of Customer Journey Map? Delivering superior customer experience in the digital age is a mindset and a cultural issue more than anything else. Though we are in the digital age, our organizational structures, processes, and measurements can still be in the past. Today, customer interactions are not limited to just sales, marketing or support. They transcend to almost all functions that are thought to be non-customer facing. While you don’t need to be in a hurry to change the entire organization structure, you can start with a basic question of “Who owns customer journey?”. That can be a good starting point to rearrange the blocks or add new ones.

Lever #3: Digital Technologies

Of the $1.3 trillion that was spent on digital transformation projects in the last year, it is estimated that $900 billion went to waste. A large chunk of this money was spent on digital technologies stressing on the importance of selection of the right technology. A thumb rule to ensure the right technology is to check the fitment with the customer journey map and the organizational structure. There are two types of technologies come in handy here – firstly, the front office platforms, such as a CRM, Marketing Automation, AI, ML, etc and secondly, the back office process and operations automation platforms. These ensure that the entire organization is geared to accelerate the customer journey and not just one function.

Lever #4: Insights and Performance Indicators for Personalization

Personalization plays a massive role in enhancing customer experience and moving them rapidly to the advocacy stage in the journey. This needs a combination of technologies and tools for analytics and a dedicated team to identify the right performance indicators, track, and analyze them. A vital function of this team is to identify and provide insights into critical opportunity areas to improve and personalize the customer journey. The opportunity identification is based on closely studying the customers’ perceptions, experiences, responses to campaigns, feedback, and their emotional highs and lows. The insights are best gathered both from qualitative channels, such as smaller group focused interviews and also more substantial group quantitative research to correlate and avoid any significant deviations.

Lever #5: Partner Ecosystem

Customer experience is the result of all interactions a customer has with your brand directly or through your partners – be it supplier, OEM, reseller, SI or a distributor. A customer’s experience at each of these touchpoints is a part of their association with your brand. Consistency and cohesion across all these interactions is essential for an engaging customer journey. By tying together all behind-the-scenes activities with partners, the seamless an all-encompassing experience can go a long way in accelerating the journey.

The Big Question

How are you doing against all these levers that influence the customer journey? I’ve seen organizations having a very-well designed customer journey maps that decorate their walls. Once in a while, they go back to the customer journey map and start tweaking it to get the best result. But, remember, every move in any lever will have an impact on the outcome. A consolidated view of with the right elements is a must to rapidly take a customer from being just aware of your brand to becoming an advocate of the brand.

Customer Journey Index

We have created just the right tool to assess your customer journey performance and to identify opportunities to improve further or accelerate the journey. This tool, once your context is built, along with our experts will provide you the right guidance and ensure that your customer enjoys unprecedented experience.

Reach out to us at info@brillio.com to find out and assess your Customer Journey Index.