Customer Journey
I was talking with an entrepreneur earlier this week for one of my online interviews, where they discussed the value of not working for a large company that allows him to customize a customer experience that improves his clients’ interactions and provides him with a sustainable advantage. Customer journey or customer experience is often overlooked, but it can really make or break a company. I think we all have had experiences with products where we liked the product well enough, but the customer experience either dampened our enthusiasm or downright turned us off the product or service.
With customer journey being this powerful, I am surprised that companies of all sizes treat customer journey as an add-on, something to do later or not at all. Most commonly, you can identify a company’s view on the customer journey as an afterthought because either they do not have a team working on customer experience or it lives in a silo.
Let’s quickly identify and define the customer journey. Customer journey, customer experience, or customer success, are all basically the same thing. I like the term customer journey because it highlights the need to look at the customer’s entire set of interactions, not just at a set time and place. In the old days, we only looked at how we interacted with customers in an isolated place. Say, for instance, support. So when the support team looked at how they interacted with customers, how they did it, what was the customer’s review of their support experience?
So once customer support gathers data, they may find things like customers are consistently complaining that the wait times are too long. So then the support team reaches out to leadership and says they need more budget to hire more people to reduce wait times. Leadership approves this, more agents are hired, wait times go down, and customer reviews trend higher. A success, right?
But if we take a step back, and don’t look at support in isolation, let’s understand why customers call in to support. Often, there are some very large buckets that callers call about. Earlier in my career, I worked for a telecommunication company, and we consistently got callers calling into support because their first monthly bill was higher than they expected. So we reviewed why clients called in, identified the high first bill as a measurable portion of our calls, and realized we could connect with other teams to head off these calls.
We worked with training and changed how the frontline sales folks positioned the first bill, having them call out that the first bill would be higher than expected and why that was. Additionally, we worked with marketing to include a flyer with that first bill to remind them that this bill would be high, give them a projection of what their ongoing bill would look like, and aim them at a webpage to understand their account better.
Once we did this, we saw the call volume of customers calling about a high first bill drop dramatically. Since this was a measurable percentage of the calls into the call center, we saw wait times go down, all without more budget. This is just one example where and why looking at the customer journey, how they interact with a company throughout their lifetime use of the product or service, not only made the customer’s experience better but saved the company money by not hiring more people to answer phones calls, but instead to drop call volume by being proactive in solving the customer’s issues. Happier customers and no increase in costs, now that is a win-win.
I have spent too much time working in large companies trying to help them understand that to do the customer journey right, the team working on customer journey cannot be isolated, they need to work across functions, and need buy-in from leadership.
But the nice thing is that most people reading this are entrepreneurs and are currently building their companies. This is good because you can start building a customer journey and intertwine a good customer experience into your company now. As entrepreneurs, as I’ve discussed before, you will wear several different hats, often those you didn’t expect to wear. What I’m asking you now is to wear all the hats at once. It is a difficult job, but as we know, as entrepreneurs, we like the challenge.
Take a step back and look at all the ways your customers interact with you. This starts with prospecting; how do you find your customer, or how do they find you? How can you make this smoother and easier? As you improve this process, it usually leads to a shorter sales cycle and increased size of deals. This is good, but it will be a bad customer journey if you sell to a customer to overpromise and underdeliver. So what happens after the sale?
How does the customer interact with the product once they get it? Does it need installation? How is that going? Do they need to learn how to use the product? Maintain the product? If they have issues, how do they connect with your company? Say, for instance, you are a landscaping company. Does your customer know when and how to water and take care of the landscaping you just installed? If not, it will die, and the customer will be unhappy. So don’t be reactive, maybe coming out and reinstalling plants, and instead understand that if you can improve education and learning resources, you can head off this issue before it happens.
The key here is not to stop when one function stops. As entrepreneurs, you are often the salesperson, the support person, the expansion/resale person, the marketing department, and everything else. This is a blessing and a curse. For the sake of the customer journey, the benefits are you don’t need to get the sales and support team together to build a process and get them all to buy into it. It’s you; you believe what you say, and you can change yourself. But the downside is that stepping back to look at the overarching customer journey takes time. It is difficult because we often lose the forest for the trees, and change can be difficult even if the only person you need to change is you. Sometimes self-change is actually tougher than helping others change. Be honest with yourself.
The challenge of customer journey can be difficult, and understanding how customers interact with you may be a challenge. I suggest identifying several “personas” for your customers. Who are the types of customers you have? What are several problems your customers are trying to solve with your product or service? Once you do this, look through your customer database and identify typical customers for each persona. Make sure you also don’t just identify successful customers, find some customers that have left. Then scrub their profiles to find out where they interacted with you, in person, on the phone, online, and with the product—interview customers, again both successful and happy customers but also customers that may have left. Then actually write out a story and a journey. Putting it on paper really helps, and you can often identify holes when you get to a story point and have nothing to write.
The earlier and more thorough you can implement a customer journey process into your company, the better. Reviewing customer journeys is not and should not be a one-time thing. As you grow, change processes, expand, etc., your journeys will change, so make sure you’re not just doing this once, but you have an ongoing process in place to continuously improve your customers’ interaction over their entire lifetime with your product or service.
Since we’re talking about knowing where you are, let’s talk about measuring. Measuring is important for most home projects. Things as simple as hanging a picture require a tape measure for centering the picture in the space and how high. So what do you look for in a measuring tape? Well, measuring tapes are fairly straightforward,and most will work. But I like mine from Kobalt because it has an auto lock. https://www.lowes.com/pd/Kobalt-25-FT-Kobalt-Wide-Blade-Self-Lock/5002180877 By this, I mean that the tape will not retract until you push the button. This is basically backward of most tape measures. The standard tape measure will retract unless you push a lock button to stop it. Self-locking tape measures stay open unless you push the release button.
Just to help with tape measure usage, for years I did not understand why the tip on a tape measure moves. The answer is simple and makes sense once you know it. To measure the outside of something, for instance, if you want to measure a 2 by 4, you hang the tip over the end of the board. Then the tip pulls out slightly to give you an accurate measurement not including the width of the tip. But if you want to measure the inside of something, like a wall, you press the tip up against the corner, and the tip slides in so as not to add the width of the tip to the measurement.
This doesn’t sound like much, but how and when I use my tape, this little feature just makes things easier. But a tape measure isn’t the only measuring tool I use. I also love having a laser measuring tool. Something like this: https://www.amazon.com/MiLESEEY-Electronic-Accuracy-Measurement-Pythagoras/dp/B085NX87K3/ These are great for large area measurements. For instance, I have a garage that I wanted to coat in Rocksolid (https://www.amazon.com/Rust-Oleum-293513-Polycuramine-Garage-Floor/dp/B06XJ17JVD/) so, I needed to know the square footage. The laser measuring tool made it quick and easy to find the length and width. On a side note, I doubled up on the floor coating at the suggestion of a friend, and I wouldn’t do it any other way. Not having to stretch out the coating meant that we got a real solid covering for the whole thing.
Laser measuring is great for large areas, but sometimes I also need very precise and accurate measuring. For that, I own a device like this: https://www.amazon.com/Kynup-Caliper-Measuring-Digital-Stainless/dp/B09964YBMF This allows you to measure smaller items and do it precisely. I use this often for things like screws to know what size I need to fix something. For instance, our kitchen cabinets came with very poor screws, so as they came loose, I replaced them with slightly longer and tighter threads, but for the first one, I measured the length of the screw and the depth of the cabinet where they screw in, to make sure that we could go longer, but not too long.