5 Common Pitfalls to Avoid When Implementing Customer Journey Mapping

Even though Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) has become a popular tool among customer experience (CX) professionals, many organizations are still not utilizing it to its fullest. Oftentimes, the cause of this is a lack of knowledge about how internal operations and data are related to the customer journey. To gain a better comprehension of the customer experience, CX experts need to comprehend the entire process customers navigate when interacting with an organization. This includes not only their dealings with the organization’s products and services, but also the processes and systems that underpin those connections.

Overview

Earlier this week, I released a short video about Customer Journey Management and its benefits for organizations, with examples from Amazon, Starbucks, Uber, Netflix, Apple, and the Financial Sector. (see the 4 minutes on YT: https://youtu.be/an5tNYXXzHo)

Wow, what a response. I didn’t expect that.
Many folks have tried and failed to deploy Customer Journey Map approaches effectively.

Here’s a summary of some of the five most significant challenges. In another article, we will discuss how to avoid them based on the best practices of those who have delivered success.

Some significant drawbacks can affect a company’s ability to provide a great experience to its customers.

🤝Customer Needs

One of these issues is a need for insight into the customer’s needs and desires. This can create an inconsistency between their services and products and the customer’s expectations, leading to disappointment and exasperation.

💖Personalization

Furthermore, not offering a personalized experience make customers feel disregarded and unappreciated.

🎸Co-ordination

Additionally, a failure to properly coordinate and integrate different channels and touchpoints can lead to an incoherent journey for the customer, making it difficult for them to get the assistance or data they require.

🏢Structural challenges

A hindrance is silo-based thinking; when a business has several separate systems and processes, it can take time to get a comprehensive outlook on the customer’s experience and to determine their path.

This can make it challenging to find and address any issues or areas that need to be improved.

✍️Connecting the dots

Understanding the link between internal operations, data, and customer experience is essential. By being aware of the overall process customers go through when interacting with an organization, and the systems and processes that back them, CX professionals can pinpoint pain points and chances for optimization within the customer journey.

Additionally, it is essential to remember that CJM is not a single-time task but rather an ongoing effort to be evaluated and updated routinely. It calls for the participation and collaboration of all levels of the organization. It serves to align initiatives from various departments to upgrade the customer experience and positively affect the business.


Conclusion:

Several specific actions will reduce the risk of poor CJM implementation. We will discuss those shortly by reviewing the best practices of companies that have delivered success.

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Learn more about CJM plus as practiced within the CEMMethod: https://www.cemmethod.com

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CX is a Team Sport. Are You Ready To Win Big?

Successful CX outcomes are akin to preparing for a major sporting event. Operating without a playbook or preparation dooms your efforts to be perceived as “wishful thinking.”

Accelerating CX adoption relies on your ability to connect strategy, organizational design, process management, people concerns, and digital/technology.

CX is a Team Sport – Play It To Win

Senior leaders are fiercely competitive. Many enjoy competitive sports in general. Many view their organizations as part of a highly competitive team sport. It is perplexing, then, that Customer Experience (CX) adoption has not been more rapid and widespread[RN2]. Great CX requires every player on the team to understand how their role contributes to success, and play within the system, adapting quickly to evolving customer needs.

Too often, CX efforts are relegated to reliance on fragile subjective metrics like NPS. So much so that the original inventor of NPS, Fred Reichheld, says ‘I had no idea how many people would mess with the score to bend it, to make it serve their selfish objectives’. This has led to leaders’ belief that #CX is disconnected from the reality of daily business, the product of people great at talking but not walking.

There has never been a better, more pressing, time to get more scientific about CX.

To build long-term success, CX programs must deliver business results by catalyzing forward-facing, objective, and connected measurement systems. CX leaders must help organizational decision-makers to “connect the dots” and appreciate the role everyone has to play in delivering successful customer outcomes.

The BP Group’s North Star is indeed this upskilling of practitioners, professionals, and masters of Customer Experience. We teach an underpinning approach that has been tried, tested, and deployed in leading global corporations which aims to educate, inform and deliver immediate results that both charm senior leaders, excite customers, and consistently deliver growing shareholder value.

CX is indeed a team sport – let’s play it to win.
You can Review the program here: https://bit.ly/ACXP2022.


Do you want to embrace advanced Customer-Centric thinking and become Outside-In?

https://lnkd.in/djWxB8m

👉 Step #1 – Review the upskilling options to become an ACX Professional & ACX Master: https://lnkd.in/dANgYX59

👉 Step #2 – Get The Book: Outside-In The Secret *FREE*  https://bit.ly/OI2021now

👉 Step #3 – Connect With The Community: https://linktr.ee/SteveTowers

👉 Step #4 – Keep Pace with Change: Recent Keynote – The Hard Benefits of XM | https://cemnext.com/xmroi2023

👉 Step #5 – Review the Testimonials Accredited Customer Experience Professional – BPG (bpgroup.org)

What are Moments of Truth?

Since the days of Richard Normann, the guy who invented the business term ‘Moments of Truth’ and Jan Carlzon’s book in 1989, the business world has interpreted Moments of Truth in several ways.

Jan Carlzon’s 1989 book ‘Moments of Truth’ socialised Richard Normann’s concept.

I have also published many articles and conference keynotes (see the MOT primer below) reviewing the continued evolution of this interesting concept.

Definitions

My interpretation and application of Moments of Truth revolve around three themes:

a. What is a Moment of Truth?

A Moment of Truth is any interaction with the customer within the Customer Experience – first discussed in my 1994 book ‘Business Process Reengineering – A Senior Executives Guide’

b. Moments of Truth are the cause of all work.

First discussed back in 2009 the idea that all work an organization undertakes is, at a fundamental level, caused by Moments of Truth. In principle, everything a company does can and should be linked to a Moment of Truth.

We harness and make real this design principle using the Customer Performance Landscape. Connecting the dots from everything to the Cause of all work – The Moment of Truth.

c. The Moment of Truth for any organization is…

At a practical level organizations need to chunk down their approach to fixing and innovating Moments of Truth. CEO of Denver based SAAS company ‘Parallel’

Doug Bell, CEO The Experience Manager

Doug Bell says “A Moment of Truth is an interaction that contributes to the production of a successful customer outcome. It either does or it doesn’t. To ensure outside in, you need to look through the Successful Customer Outcome lens.”

Managing Moments of Truth

Enlightened ‘Outside-In’ organizations actively embrace Moment of Truth Management as an essential strategic and operational necessity to deliver engineered Customer Experiences. How so?

a. Designing for Moments of Truth – The Design-Implementation Gap

Early efforts were geared around designing optimal Moments of Truth, however, simply mapping customer journeys has never been enough. It is one thing agreeing on what a future state customer journey should be, it is entirely another implementing it. This Design-Implementation gap is precisely what kills the majority of Customer Experience initiatives.

b. Implementing optimized Moments of Truth

Successful deployment of innovated Moments of Truth is key to delivering optimal Customer Experiences. The most practical immediate results are focused on rapid roll out across a key experience and using the success of that to validate rolling out smoothly across the organization. Establishing ownership, accountability, metrics, controls and improvement paths are part of this discipline.

c. Operationalizing Moments of Truth

Once Moments of Truth have been designed, innovated and implemented into recrafted customer experiences they need to be actively managed ‘in the moment’ and shared. Every Moment of Truth should feed to a corporate dashboard, with real-time data showing the performance of that MOT and its associated experiences. If things go wrong the owner should be able to ‘course correct’ and real-time monitor the customer experience delivery.

Imagine a world without customer satisfaction surveys, no need for Net Promoter Scores, no focus groups, and no mystery shopping because you will know how 100% of interactions are performing 100% of the time.

Control and Action combined

The C suite and leaders will now have a clear line of sight into every corner of the organization and across the enterprise landscape REAL TIME. One version of the data truth (and not all those departmental/divisional versions of reality).

The need for retrospective action evaporates. Immediate and laser-focused control can be maintained delivering simultaneously enhanced service, lower costs, higher revenues, improved compliance and uber motivated employees.

What’s next?

In my next piece I will demonstrate how this can be done immediately. If you can’t wait for that ping me and let’s talk the how, now



MOT primer…

Steve Towers
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetowers/

Richard Normann – creator of the Moments of Truth concept:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Normann

Jan Carlzon – author ‘Moments of Truth’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Carlzon

Doug Bell – CEO of The Experience Manager
‘The Moments of Truth Management System’
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhbell/

Moments of Truth 2009
https://www.slideshare.net/stowers/moments-of-truth-perth2009

That Kodak Moment of Truth
https://www.processexcellencenetwork.com/innovation/columns/4-lessons-from-the-kodak-moment-of-truth

** Just published **
Mitch Belsley 2019 – Get Scientific about Managing Moments of Truth
http://customerthink.com/get-scientific-about-managing-moments-of-truth/

The Ten Commandments of Customer Experience (updated)

It is good to have a guide in life. Many of us share political creeds, religious beliefs and codes of honor to guide our decision making.
Wouldn’t it be crazy good to have the same for the doctrine of Customer Experience?
When I co-authored the best selling book “CEM Success without Exception” back in 2006 Customer Experience Management was in its infancy.

Now thirteen years later we have the accumulated wisdom of the giants of Customer Experience Management, proof that focus on Successful Customer Outcomes, Outside-In and working backwards are fundamental to becoming a winning organization.

It is with these thoughts in mind and the worthy experience of many that I set pen to paper to craft these tenets as guidelines for all of us seeking to maximise our deployment of Customer Experience Management.

1. Customers are first, front and center for everything.

Understanding that all the work an organization undertakes ultimately stems from a customer interaction is key. Work to engineer every experience to the optimum.

2. Listen to the questions customers ask you.

Resist the subjective ‘voice of customer’ surveys (they are biased and unrepresentative) and focus on understanding and articulating needs – the Needs of the Customer.

3. Stop selling and let people buy.

Customers are now prosumers and most know what they want and how to get it. You will not win them if you force sell; in fact, you will make enemies of them.

4. Map the Complete Experience.

Connecting the dots across every interaction, inside and out, to ensure everything is aligned

This is both the stuff the customer sees (the customer journey and the brand promise) and the work that takes place across the rest of the organization to support all interactions. Combine those the Employee Experience and the Customer Experience you are nearing the Complete Experience; these are not separate things but should be viewed through the same lens.

The CEMMethod.com can help you in seeing the Complete Experience. 

See also 6 step ‘Duck Theory’ videos: http://bit.ly/DuckTheoryJames

5. Create your brand and be the brand you create.

Customers develop trust when you say what’ll you do, and then do what you say. Conversely, do not project yourself as something you are not.

6. Be consistent and truthful across all your channels.

Customers will interact in ways and times that suit them, so ensure you keep a coherent message across all experiences.

7. Act on People liking people.

Do not hide behind automation, whether that is voice systems, web interactions or even text messaging. The most intimate relationships are formed with people, not computers.

Keep in front of the song.

8. Creating memorable experiences requires anticipation and coordination.

Fix problems before they happen, and when problems do arise (they will) pull out the stops to put things right.

9. Design every customer experience for the category of customer.

You should never ever treat all customers in the same way. Personalization and direct communication are proven winners in an era of standardization.

10. Employees are your first customers.

Happy Employees Create Happy Customers who come back for more, thus pleasing shareholders

If they ain’t happy your paying customers won’t be either. Treat your people well and let them know they are the most critical part of the brand and the complete customer experience.

​”Let’s not beat around the bush… Customer experience is the new battleground. 
At The Experience Manager,  BP Group, and Rockstar.cx 
we know the art of this new war. 
We have the tools, the technology and the strategies to remorselessly create victories for our clients as we build a more customer-centric world, one experience and one enterprise at a time”.

Steve Towers


Join us for Complete Experience Management with coaching, training, consultancy and Certification at www.bpgroup.org 

Upcoming Open classes:
Johannesburg: https://joburgacxsep2019.eventbrite.com
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CX Ecosystem:

https://www.theexperiencemanager.com

Fantastic keynotes:
https://www.rockstar.cx