Building value into the whole customer journey

In our experience, a number of issues tend to feed into one another. For instance, where a skills and knowledge deficit, lack of available tools or budget can all frustrate efforts to identify measurable results across a rapidly changing, complex channel mix, consistent measurement becomes difficult to pin down.

The dearth of available channels and decreasing linearity of touch points is a key factor in this problem. Email, social, online display, PR and media; all are often measured differently, by different tools, often with different KPIs and objectives. All this data provides, at best, a fragmented view.

The customer’s point of view isn’t fragmented across channels. The quality of their brand experience is a true measure of how effective you are, and it doesn’t make any allowances for awkwardly intersecting parts of the puzzle.

Through customer journey analysis, we work with clients to build a coherent idea of what the customer’s brand experience looks like at every step. This allows us to identify gaps and opportunities in the management of the journey, points where reality falls short of your ideal brand perception. Also, crucially, it enables us to pinpoint where the most effective money is being spent, and where less-effective spend can be cut back.

A proper customer journey analysis is a big project, but can be invaluable in complex situations where multiple customer touch points cross different spheres of responsibility across teams or departments within an organisation. The process itself requires honesty and transparency across all these internal borders, which in itself often yields surprising results and efficiencies that were previously hidden in plain sight.

We’ll steer the analysis through a number of stages, building up a picture of every conceivable action a customer can undertake. What their views and emotions reflect at each point provides clear context and depth for objectives, and improvements.

Ultimately, the idea is to introduce a set of integrated, coherent and consistent guiding principles that allow frontline staff to improve each brand touch point. Journey planning enables you to recognise the crucial moments of truth, across all channels, and provides the insight to align your ideal brand perception with what your customers experience in the real word.