Current state journey map

Our client engaged CXCO to help them understand their current state end-to-end customer experience and identify the value drivers of their customers. Our client wanted to identify key pain points, barriers to conversation, and gain insight into what customers expect and need across the different stages of their journey. Our clients’ intent with the journey map was to use the output to educate the business, inform operational improvements and channel development, guide their decisions when they came to design the future state business model and resulting customer experience, and improve their NPS through the identification of the moments that drive promotion and detraction.

At the outset it became apparent that many of the organisation's employees had little visibility or understanding of the end-to-end experience. One of the issues this created was the formation of a business culture that had a singular focus on a given channel and stage within the customer experience. This singular focus, combined with a lack of understanding of the end-to-end experience, impacted their decisions and led them to be reactive rather than proactive when it came to responding to customer complaints, issues and suggestions.

The business was also incentivised to focus on the customer interaction as a transaction rather than considering the interaction as part of an on-going relationship or much more extensive end-to-end experience of the brand. This reduced the customer to a single transaction, and did little to engender advocacy or the creation of a longer-term relationship. Through the creation of the journey map the business gained a qualitative view across the customer experience that provided meaning to otherwise empty conversion figures.

CXCO leveraged voice of the customer data, customer research, and gathered business intellectual property to understand the current state experience. We completed call centre listening and shadowing to understand - in more depth - the experience of the customer. We mapped the insights on a multi-channel journey map, which identified customer pain points, reasons for dropout, needs, expectations, emotional state, and channel interactions. A roadmap of continuous improvement initiatives was identified from the roadmap, and opportunities for further exploration in the future state strategy were defined.

What were the key benefits?

  • Helped the business understand the holistic customer experience and enabled them to make objective customer-centred decisions.
  • Identified improvement initiatives to remove pain points, reduce detractor numbers, and support NPS efforts.
  • Brought clarity to the current customer experience and made visible what customer value and expect across the stages of the journey.
  • The insights set the foundations for strategic planning and informed the creation of the organisations customer promise and operational initiatives.
  • Identified barriers to conversion through the identification of breakpoints and moments of truth.
  • Business requirements gathering was no longer a business-centric activity, but now involved the inclusion of customer requirements to drive the direction of product and service changes.

What were the key results?

  • The management team and wider business were educated on the current state experience of the customer. This helped build empathy and reframe the experience for stakeholders, helping them understand that the customer does not know their business the way they do.
  • Collaboration activities throughout the process ensured buy-in and ownership of identified issues, initiatives and opportunities. This simplified the subsequent change process.
  • Guidelines and principles informed operational initiatives to drive consistency across the experience, and recommendations on the next best steps at an enterprise level were made to support these efforts and take the organisation in a customer centred direction.

What was the approach?

CXCO tapped into business IP to understand the existing customer experience view and identify gaps in enterprise strategy. Voice of the customer data was leveraged to inform the skeleton of the end-to-end experience represented as a persona based customer journey. This was refined through analysis of available assets and research. Shadow research ensured the journey reflected and represented current workflows and tasks completed, while call centre listening informed understanding of the emotional journey of the customer, and highlighted key breakpoints and moments of truth.

Storytelling was used to share the customer journey with stakeholders, conveying dense research and deep insight in a memorable format. Through engagement workshops the business familiarised themselves with the current end-to-end experience, and facilitated opportunities workshops helped the different business units and channels address pain points and identify initiatives to improve the customer experience.