By
Mark McGregor, Signavio
Customer Experience is one of the hottest
topics discussed in business right now. Almost every journal you read or web site
you visit seems to be full of variants stating, “why it should be important to
you” and “how your business will be at risk.”
Customer experience management seems to
mean different things to all people and there are just as many arguments about
what it means as there are ways of improving those customer experiences.
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With customers having a wider choice in
just about every field, whether B2B or B2C, the experiences those customers
have, or will have, drive your ability to generate revenue, and of course
profit. However, sales and marketing professionals aren’t typically the people
that deliver your service experiences, ship your products, train customers or
schedule resources. In short, they are not the people one typically associates
with delivering operational excellence.
Well, perhaps it is a technique known as
Customer Journey Mapping (CJM). The technique is widely talked about as THE way
to capture and model the way that customers interact with your organization.
CJM captures steps that customers take, the interactions (moments of truth)
that they have, and further capture the emotions associated with those actions.
CJM is a technique for capturing and
questioning journeys, but the map is only as good as the people who create it.
It is true that great customer experiences don’t happen by magic. For the most
part the CJMs are still being created by the same engineers and engineering
thinking that you have always used.
This thinking tends to start with examining
“what is,” and then building based on what you have. In other words, the
initial work is focused on the “now” or “what has been.” However, as Edward de
Bono once said “You can analyse the past, but you need to design the future.
That is the difference between suffering the future and enjoying it.” This
suggests that rather than thinking first about what or why things are as they
are, we might be better to focus more of our efforts on designing the future,
suggesting that we need “imagineers,” not engineers.
Whilst an engineer will look to take
something such as a taxi booking system and make it easier to book or pay for a
taxi, it takes an imagineer to come up with the idea of ride sharing like Uber
or Lyft. These imagineers do not start by thinking from your organization’s
perspective, or map journeys that start and end within your organizational
boundary. They start by imagining new journeys that we had never thought
possible, and then set about building or rebuilding their businesses to deliver
them.
Imagineers are the true disruptors, and
they are perhaps the biggest threat not just to businesses, but potentially to
entire industries. If you think of an electric vehicle, you likely think of
Tesla, and for hybrid Toyota comes to mind with the Prius. However, most major
manufacturers are seeking to make the switch, mostly driven by government
regulation.
Beyond this, what you may not know is that
DHL is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of electric vehicles, or that
the longest range electric bicycle (226 miles) is not made by a bike company
but by Delfast, a Ukrainian Courier company.
If you want to look to the future, consider
asking arts or other innovative people to start mapping possible customer
journeys in your market without preconceptions. Note that those journeys may
start and end way beyond your current organizational boundaries.
For example, when taking a flight, your
journey doesn’t end at the airport. It ends when you arrive back at your house
— hopefully with all of your luggage. When installing cable or broadband in your
home, the journey doesn’t end when it is installed or when you pay the first
bill. Instead, it ends when you can browse the Internet or watch your preferred
TV program. If a hospital is to order a new piece of medical equipment, the
journey doesn’t end at installation, but rather after the first successful
patient diagnosis, or when you get paid for the first scan performed.
Understanding both the true trigger point
and true endpoint, you can better place yourself in the customer’s journey,
which identifies threats to your business and opportunities for growth and
expansion. One thing you can be sure of in today’s ever more technologically
enabled world is that chances are, somebody out there is conceiving of customer
journeys that may involve what you currently do.
Currently
serving as SVP Strategy at Signavio, Mark McGregor was
formerly a Research Director at leading IT industry analysis firm Gartner. McGregor
has been around the BPM market for many years and is widely respected for his
knowledge and views on business change. He is the creator of “Next Practice.”
