Customer Journeys: An Introduction

A definition of Customer Journeys

Customer Journeys are an essential concept in the domain of customer experience management. A customer journey describes all events and experiences a customer goes through to reach a goal, fulfill a need or while interacting with a brand. A customer journey consist of events that describe what has happened to the customers as well as experiences that describe how the customer felt during these events. Events and experiences are then translated into a visualization to show positive and negative experiences. Customer journeys are often compared to customer processes and buying cycles, the main difference is that customer journeys explicitly include emotions and not just events or activities.

The scope of a customer journey depends on the research scope and can focus only on the interactions a customer has with a company or go beyond an organizations boundaries and include all interactions that a users experiences, starting with the first moment he was aware of a need until his need was fulfilled. The customer journey of a car buyer could be visualized as shown below.

The timeline on the X-Axis that shows the sequence of the events have happened, the Y-Axis shows the emotions of the buyer and how they have experienced each event. This visualization also shows the benefit compared to traditional measures of customer satisfaction which usually provide solely one dimensional perspective on the customer experience and customer satisfaction. Customer journeys add another dimension which dramatically increases the resolution of your understanding of the customer experience.

Customer Journeys provide new insights into consumers by incorporating an emotional as well a time-based dimension of consumer behavior.

Customer Journeys and Customer Experience

Customer journeys are an essential tool for customer experience management because they provide complete, high-resolution insights into the customer’s experiences and behavior. Customer journeys are the visualization of your customer’s experiences while interacting with your brand and it turns out that improving customer experience without understanding the customer journey is a very difficult endeavor.

A customer journey can also contain events that are not directly related to a company yet are still relevant to understand consumer behavior. Two customers who buy a smartphone on Amazon.com might have completely different journeys. While one customer might spend most of his time on non-Amazon websites before his purchase, others might go directly to the site and rely heavily on the recommendations and product reviews on Amazon.com itself. Understanding these differences in behavior builds the foundation to extend existing services and reduce friction from the customer’s experience. Informed decisions for improving the customer experience can only be made by understanding these differences in the customer journeys.

Documenting Customer Journeys

The first step to document customer journeys is to identify relevant customers. If personas have already been defined one could select real customers that represent certain personas, if one hasn’t worked with personas before one can select users and develop personas based on your insights separately.

There are two fundamental approaches how to document customer journeys:

Ad-Hoc Documentation:Ad-Hoc customer journey documentation happens when customers document their customer journeys right at the moment the events and experiences happen. This can be done through hand-written diaries that are written by the customer and analyzed after a certain time period.

Post-Hoc Documentation: Post-Hoc customer journey documentation uses interviews to understand the event and experiences a customer has had when interacting with a certain company. Instead of interviews it is also possible to use web-based tools that help customers to document their customer journeys.

The starting point for both of these research methods can be freely defined, it usually starts with the questions: “What was the first event that lead to the decision buy a car/buy a smartphone/do ….”. Users document their customer journeys and the results of these journeys are then analyzed and synthesized into one consolidated customer journey. This consolidated customer journey is then used to perform an analysis where improvements can be implemented.

Working with Customer Journeys

Once a consolidated customer journey has been created, the next step is to work with this customer journey to identify the areas that influence the customer experience.

1) Where do customers have positive, neutral and negative experiences?

2) What can be done to improve the customer experience in these areas?

3) Are there any events where activities of the organization go unnoticed by the customers and do not generate a positive return?

The primary focus should certainly be on removing negative customer experiences as well as identifying events that are present an opportunity to create positive customer experiences. While the documentation and analysis of the customer journey has been an analytic process, the development of solutions to address these problems is a creative process which we call “customer experience design”.

Service Recovery: A Best-Practice has become State-of-the-Art

Service failures happen in every organization. Even in the best-managed organizations it is impossible to guarantee a 100% service level and if one thing is certain it is that there will be events when the customer is left unsatisfied because the promised service has not been delivered.

The boulevard of broken promises

Broken promises to customers are certainly not a new phenomenon, they have happened for decades but with the shift from seller-markets to buyer-markets in the last century and the rise of online social networks in the last decade has changed the way organizations have to respond to service failures.

The latest case study comes from BlackBerry, who is compensating its customers for the service outage in early October, but they are not the first company to do so. Skype has offered its customers free credits after they experienced a downtime when the Skype servers crashed in December 2010. In April 2011, Sony was facing serious backlash due to the security problems and the corresponding shutdown of the Sony Playstation Network. Sony compensated frustrated customers with free games and access to premium content.

Where were you at the big BlackBerry outage of 2011?

BlackBerry has experienced a severe service outage in early October when the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) was unavailable for up to four days. For those who are not familiar with this service: BIS is the email infrastructure that is used to send emails to a BlackBerry device. This increases security compared to traditional ways of accessing emails on mobile devices and supports real-time notifications. The key difference from a consumer perspective is that every BlackBerry owner has to pay a monthly fee in order to access this service – otherwise they will be unable to receive emails own their device. As a consequence, the BlackBerry outage left millions of users without their emails on their BlackBerry and turned BlackBerry devices into plain phones again.

The outcry was understandably very loud, a large part was due to the crisis management from Research in Motion: If millions of your customers are without BlackBerry E-Mail delivery service, then you cannot update your website every 12 hours – 18 hours as it has been the case in the early stages of this outage. After three days RIM increased their updates, hosted conference calls and co-Founder and CEO Mike Lazaridis posted a video online apologizing about the problems.

RIM sets a new standard: compensating all customers for the service outage

In the aftermath it has become clear that RIM and the BlackBerry brand have taken severe damage and customers and the media started to demand a compensation. BlackBerry announced that they will offer free BlackBerry Apps worth more than 100 USD to each BlackBerry user as well as extended service contracts for existing business customers. This is the right procedure and it will certainly calm the initial criticism, if it will help to reverse the long-term damage is something one cannot predict right now.

Service recovery is not just a buzzword anymore

All these examples are an indicator of a trend that I have been observing for quite a while: If a company is not delivering on its promises, it has to compensate its customers for the service problems. The cases of Skype, Sony and RIM all set examples that consumers will remember next time their broadband connection is not available, their newspaper gets not delivered or their flights are delayed.

Whenever a company uses service recovery to rebuild customer satisfaction and loyalty, it implicitly sets a new service standard customers take for granted next time a service problem occurs.

Service recovery as an opportunity

Service Recovery is not necessarily a bad thing that needs to be prevented. If it is done correctly, which means that the customers problems are fixed in a timely manner, there is clear and honest communication and the service recovery has a personal touch, then customer loyalty can actually increase to levels higher than before the incident. This phenomenon is called service recovery paradox and can be an opportunity to build customer loyalty.

The conclusion for consumer service companies

The conclusion from these events is that organizations need to be prepared for such service problems, not just from a technical perspective with procedures how to restore the service but also from an organizational perspective to communicate directly and in real-time to consumers. Once the service is restored they can work on a service recovery package and communicate the service recovery efforts. It is probably a good idea to start to think about ideas for service recovery, estimate their costs and benefits and create guidelines to be prepared when the inevitable problem occurs.

Or you don’t, in which case you better prepare your social media team to monitor the anger and customer frustration on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

How Google and Facebook might lose their edge by selling out their users

I am not a big fan of doom saying and predicting the demise of two of the most important companies in the IT industry in the last decade. Nevertheless in recent months some very interesting events have happened at Google and Facebook.

These events are worth a closer look to better understand current industry dynamics and the challenge of balancing the needs of your users with those of paying customers.

What is Google’s and Facebook’s business?

Google and Facebook are two companies that offer free services ranging from search, email, social networking and others. Both make their money through advertising which brings us to the core concept of the business model of these companies: If users get everything for free, Google and Facebook need to make money another way by getting to know their users and selling that information through advertising channels to other companies.  

Are these companies in the business of “organizing the world’s information” (Google) or ” to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected” (Facebook)? Or are they in the business of selling access to users for advertisers?

Now I don’t want to criticize this business model because obviously it is working from an economic perspective and users can have value by very targeted advertisements. Yet evolving such a business model is a very delicate endeavor. There is a fine line between balancing the need to increase user engagement through remarkable user experiences and the need to increase “access to and information about users” for advertisers.

One indicator that this balance has been slightly lost is how the communication of Google and Facebook has changed in recent months. It has changed in a way where both companies are disguising their intentions to collect more information about their users with new features and then arguing their way around it. Let’s look at two examples:

Google Plus: We need your real name

Why does Google want to you to create a profile on their social network with your real name? Because this dramatically increases the value of their platform to advertisers. Once you sign up to Google Plus and agree that Google can use your personal information for advertising, users give permission to be targeted by name. It is probably just a matter of time until you can buy Google Adwords to target specific people in specific circles or network. 

By hiding this behind a social network and combining it with Eric Schmidt’s famous statement of “Privacy is not such a big deal because if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of” shows that Google is pushing hard to move its advertising platform to the next level.

Facebook Like Buttons: We know everything about you

Facebook is also trying to create better profiles about its users with Mark Zuckerberg advocating that people should start sharing more and more of their life. To support this, people started adding Facebook Like buttons added to a homepage, Facebook is able to track your behavior online – even without you clicking on the button. This creates sophisticated knowledge about its users and what they are looking at. Once again, a brilliant business move that disguises behavior tracking through a “Like Button”. By the way, Google is doing the same through its free Google Analytics platform that is installed on the majority of websites to track visitor statistics.

The challenge when users and customers are completely different

In both companies and in the underlying business model, the users are different from the customers. While the initial success of these companies has been driven by a focus on the end user and the user experience, it seems that in order to achieve further economic success, both companies focus primarily now on their paying customers than on their users.

It is a very crucial moment in the growth of both companies and also a very interesting case study for customer experience practitioners. We can observe at the time it is happening whether Google and Facebook are able to balance this trade-off or if they drift off in one direction. Either development will be interesting to observe.

How Organizational Silos created an User Experience Deadlock at Microsoft

Microsoft gets a lot of heat for the purported lack of quality, usability and performance in their software applications and one might think that the company is just not aware of these problems. Indeed if this would be the case, it would be an easy problem to solve. Unfortunately, reality looks different: Microsoft knows about most “problems” of their customers’ experience, but they are unable to do something about it.

Bill Gates does Usability-Testing

So how can a company like Microsoft not be able to solve these problems? It’s not that Microsoft employees are not as smart, hard-working or creative as their competitors. In one document that surfaced during an anti-trust lawsuit, Bill Gates himself sent an e-Mail in 2003 to his team describing his experience using “Windows Movie Maker”.  The first line starts with a strong statement, the full email can be found at the end of this post or downloaded here.

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.

[…. two pages of text describing his experience, then his conclusion at the end….]

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my program, s Iist garbage and being scared and seeing that
Microsoft com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.

The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a
low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don’t you just love that root
certificate message?

His direct reports then start to analyze the problem, trying to find out who is or should be responsible for a quick fix and the result is something that happens every day in many other companies: Somehow, every department is affected a little bit, but nobody is responsible for the overall user experience. This leads to a “user experience deadlock” where each business unit (Windows, Microsoft.com, Windows Update) could contribute to an improvement, but due to lack of coordination nothing is done.

So I take from this that we have lots of opinions and input However, no one appears to be saying that we,
WMPG, are chartered and/or should own this. So my feedback on the thread would then be that Dave should
take ownership for driving groups around today’s inconsistencies, and that we should send this mail to Bharat
(owns WU) as well and ask who in his team can take requirements from DM

The challenge for better customer experiences

The key point is not that I want to blame Microsoft. Instead it shows which management capability is needed in organizations to deal with these kind of problems: The ability to work across departments to create an integrated customer experience. Sounds easy, but it remains one of the biggest leadership and management challenges.

The full email, download the complete PDF.

From:

Bill Gates

Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM

To: Jim Allchin Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.

Let me give you my experience from yesterday.

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

It wasn’t in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.

These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:Documents and SettingsbillgMy DocumentsMy Pictures seem clear.

They are not filtered by the system … and so many of the things are strange.

I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying – where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!).

I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

Doesn’t Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time.

What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.

So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.

So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.

What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker.

So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.

At some point I get told I need to go get Windows Media Series 9 to download.

So I decide I will go do that. This time I get dialogs saying things like “Open” or “Save”. No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.

The download is fast and the install takes 7 minutes for this thing.

So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there.

It is not there.

What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.

Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.

What an absolute mess.

Moviemaker is just not there at all.

So I give up on Moviemaker and decide to download the Digital Plus Package.

I get told I need to go enter a bunch of information about myself.

I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.

I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.

The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don’t you just love that root certificate message?)

When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback.

Better Customer Service, Lower Costs: Five Opportunities to Make it Happen

Customer service has an interesting role in many organizations. Everyone agrees on the importance of great customer service to build customer loyalty, yet managers of customer service departments are constantly confronted with cost-reductions. Especially in the after-sales stage of a customer’s life cycle organizations try to keep a tight grip on costs.

There is tremendous opportunity for organizations that understand the strategic opportunity of remarkable customer service with the consequence that better customer service does not necessarily mean to increase headcounts.

Several trends and changes in consumer behavior create new opportunities to redefine customer service and find ways to deliver better customer service at reduced costs. Based on my experience of setting up and scaling the customer service for some of my own ventures I would like to share my insights.

No customer service is the best service

When customers are contacting your customer service department it is already too late. The ultimate goal is that your customers never need to contact your customer service department because either they don’t have questions or they are answered already somewhere else.

The best customer service is no customer service but this also requires that this is kept in mind already from the moment a new product or service is created. Analyzing the current call center statistics will give the first starting points to understand where the biggest areas for improvement are and with the discipline to incorporate improvements the calls to the customer care center can be dramatically improved.

Nobody denies that this is the most difficult opportunity, but it is also the one with the highest potential.

Ignoring service recovery is unacceptable

Sometimes things just go wrong. Maybe there is a sudden problem problem with a your car due to a mistake made during maintenance, or an outage due to human errors with your Internet connection or you just bought a new computer and it just wont boot due to a glitch during production.

Situations like these are extremely annoying to consumers but these are the essential “moments of truth” that can break or strengthen a customer’s relationship with a brand. The service recovery paradox states that even in situations where customer loyalty is negatively impacted, the right service recovery activities can restore customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. It can even be increased to levels higher than they where before the incident if the service recovery is done fast, honestly and really aims to solve the customers problems.

As a consequence businesses need to ensure that if these events happen, they need to be frank and admit that this is a problem and apologize to customers. Consumers don’t just accept that a problem is solved, they also want to taken serious and be reassured that this will not happen again in the future. If that is not the case, customers will just start to look for other companies that offer the same service. Especially in mature markets there is always another competitor with a new and better offer to win over customers from companies who don’t take their customers serious.

Ask happy customer to spread the word

The goal of customer service is to have satisfied customers and we try all kinds of things to achieve that. If this has been achieved, very often companies stop and do not leverage the moment when customers are happy and satisfied. A sentence: “Thank you, I really appreciate your great service.” should not go unnoticed. The standard reply should be “It was our pleasure and we hope you tell your friends and family about it!”

If it is something very specific and you are corresponding via E-Mail, you can just add a sentence and ask “If you liked our service it would be great if you could leave a comment on our website or become our friend on Facebook. Here is the link: Have a great day!”. If you don’t believe me, just try a small scale experiment in your customer service department and see for yourself what impact this will have.

Surprise customers with innovative customer service tools

It’s the little secret of early-stage startups to connect with customers, surprise them and instantly connect with them: Integrating a live chat on your website and allowing customer to quickly reach out to you and also to pro-actively reach out them and ask them if they have any questions. I have used live chat software myself on several of my websites and I am doing it whenever I would like to quickly connect with customers. This way you can not only deliver a very responsive customer service but you will realize that calls and emails to the customer care center will be significantly reduced while in many situations an agent can handle multiple interactions at the same time.

Customer service from customers for customers

Outsourcing customer service to customers? A few years ago people would have thought this is a crazy idea but with the rise of online forums the internet has become an important place for customer service. In online customer support forums passionate customers help other customers with their problems and therefore reduce the inbound calls to customer care departments. The “helping customers” certainly need to be passionate about a product or brand but passion alone is not enough. These forums also need to communicate “helper status” through the form of leaderboards, kudos points or other incentives that reward customers who help other customers. Of course you don’t want people to do it for the money but you want it to be fair for everyone involved.

Customer communities can work but they need moderation. Just setting up a forum and hoping that users will go there will backfire, especially in critical situations when there is a major problem. A long term view on the support forums is essential as well, because products will change and information in the forum will be outdated. If it is not possible to exclude this information from searches, customers will find outdated information and will be left without help as well.

Customer Service Anywhere

Social Media has given a voice to consumers that can be broadcasted in real time on the internet and the right messages will be picked up and will spread like wild fire. Got a bad customer experience with an Airline? Just create a song and millions of people might see it on YouTube. Do you think you have been treated unfair at the hotline? You can find out in real-time what customers are saying about your brand on Twitter.

The most important rule when developing a social media strategy is that it is not a one-way channel but a two-way channel. This means that companies need to listen and they need to listen not just to the praise and “Likes” on Facebook but also to the questions and complaints that customers have.

Does this mean you have to solve peoples problems with 140 characters through Twitter? No. You can guide them to your hotline (maybe you even have a special hotline for contacts through social media) and they will take care of it. But you have to listen and guide them, not ignore them and just send them marketing messages.

These trends will further influence customer service and how it is organized and delivered. There will certainly be companies that will keep struggling with low-quality products and will not make up lost ground with better customer service. But many companies are in situations where they have great products and with the right strategy these companies are able to deliver not just average service experiences but indeed remarkable service experiences.