Analytical: Customer Journey Mapping & Service Analytics

Customer journeys has become one of the biggest buzz words since LEAN. For most people the first questions is; “What is it?” and “How is this relevant for me?” Now, as many of you has realized after Googling customer journey and customer journey mapping, the entire idea is to map out the desired experience a customer should have when ordering a product or calling your contact center. The next step is comparing this to what is actually happing – This is when the fun start and most get it wrong. Some studies indicate that the customer’s actual behavioral patterns does not match the intended behavior in 9 out of 10 cases or less. Now why is that?

Customer Journey mapping initiatives usually starts with a clever idea to identify the customer’s intention, need or behavior. We are spending millions in trying to figure out the optimum process for the customer to make this happen. We spend tremendous amounts in creating a smooth shopping basket. We spend even more in creating a “click to interact with one of our agents”. We are even trying to figure out the next product to buy, based on segmentations, buying behavior studies, basket statistics etc.  Some end up in a scenario where the service designers draw out the entire process in visually compelling flowcharts where you can follow how and what the customer should experience in each step of the process – Of course the story ends with a big smile on the customer and an a little speaking bubble. “This company really rocks! –an awesome experience”

The gruesome fact is that none of this has even the remotest connection to reality. Your customers (your revenue source) are different. They are different in many ways, have different settings, different agendas and different needs than your processes. No shopper is the same, no complainer the same and no service requester the same. Now you could argue that “we still have a multi-billion business online” – True, but do you know what kind of pain you expose your customers to? A recent study show that the intended process a customer should go through when ordering a product should have been a fairly straight forward process, tend to end up in the wrong end of the scale. You get their interest, start ordering, and finalize the order – all good.

To explain what is happening, let´s look at a daily life example. You would like to order a new set-top box / decoder for your TV.  The service realization process consists of a series of events that need to happen within a company. Our example is a set-up box from your local Cable-TV provider. A box needs to be shipped, A card need to be printed and shipping, Instructions have to be added, Subscription plans need to be updated, invoices need to be printed, the username should be sent to the customer and the service needs to be activated. All of this should be fairly straightforward. The problem though is that, in your cost cutting efficient world, none of these events are carried out by the same person, nor division or company. We have cut all the costs we can to provide a better service and let the “experts” in every field do their part.

Now trying to keep this together in a smooth, reliable flow is virtually impossible – and guess what: the customer is the next door lady age 75 – completely removed from any practical sense and the quite opposite of a tech savvy teenager. You just realized that you might up to your ankles. She knows how to use her phone and of course starts harassing your call-center and you know that you are ****** (in a not so pleasant situation).  The intended flow from the service designer is not happening – this shit is going viral! (This grand old Lady is on facebook and an active amateur contributor to the local newspaper)

Deeply concerned you realize that she is not alone. People that do not really give a flying Dutchman about reading your instructions and starts calling the call center explaining that they have received a box, but not a card, but that the invoice was paid almost the second they ordered your service. In addition, the flickering screen during set-up has made their five year old grandson sick to the stomach and they really need a refund and a lollipop for their trouble.

You call on your service designer to explain herself! The answer based on a sample of 100 calls and qualitative questionnaires show that the customers do not follow the intended process. No **** Sherlock!

Now, you know! Somehow, you get the overall understanding that everything is working according to the overall intention.

Well Do you?  Do you really have trust that you have all the facts from your suppliers shipping schedule, their routines, your service activation schedule? You suddenly realize that if you could get the facts from all sources put together, by digging into the hard facts of your service organization, your production scheme – you could suddenly have a real world example to compare to. And the best of all – you do not get only 100 of the requests – you get all of them. All the 137.156 orders last month making out your 1.47 billion annual revenue.

By merging the competence from IT service analytics (that has been developed by cutting edge IT service providers during the past 10 years), with pure service design competence and real business analytics data, you can provide your organization with real, fact oriented, easy to understand analytics that enable people to make sound business decisions on how to close the gap between the actual and desired process flow. We are ready to provide real value chain analytics – end to end – in the technical environment, with real customer analytics from the business side, cost of sales, segment profitability, channel & service cost, revenue and spend analysis. Are your ready to take a giant leap for your customers and for your profit margin?