Have Your Cake and Eat it Too: Great Customer Experience Does It All

Journeys, journeys, journeys. I've been using that word a lot recently with my clients, in my speeches, with my colleagues. And it's not because I like the band Journey (though they do have some good songs). Excelling at delivering great experiences across a customer journey - the full set of interactions with a brand to accomplish a task - delivers more value than providing excellent customer experience in a single interaction. It's the difference between having a great experience buying cable and having it installed vs. just having a good conversation with the customer service person on the phone (when everything else about the experience could be horrible.)

This customer journey approach is a fundamentally important way to understand how your business needs to work. It defines how your departments need to work together, what content you need to develop, what technology you should invest in, what people you need, what metrics you need to track, and, ultimately, how much you want to grow.

Yes, I hear you saying: It's a lot of work to do all that. Is it worth it? It's a very good question, and no one should build a customer journey program unless they have a good answer for it. Too often we take it as faith that customer satisfaction is a business goal in itself, whereas it's a means to a business end, ie. above-market growth. In our research, we've found that success in customers journeys delivers much greater business value than excelling at individual touchpoints. This presentation above gives you more of the details but I also want to spell out all the accumulated business benefits (my colleague, Dorian Stone, calls them "stacked wins") of succeeding in delivering excellent customer journeys:

1. Customer satisfaction scores increase 20%

2. Revenue growth (through reduced churn, acquisition, etc) increases 10% - 15%

3.Costs to serve decrease 15% - 20%

4. Employee satisfaction increases 20% - 30%

Those are all real numbers reflecting business value actually achieved. So, let's hear it for journeys.

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