Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the "Customer" in Customer Experience (and at the Heart of Your Business)
Annette Franz has written a must-read for anyone that works with customers. She differentiates the customer service and customer experience roles as; "customer experience is proactive, while customer service is reactive."
We have more—big and small, hard and soft—customer data than ever before. Leveraging it to truly serve and stay relevant to those customers is the greatest business development opportunity there is.
Today businesses need to have amazing people at each stage of their customer interactions, customer experience, customer service, customer success. While they are three departments in many enterprises they all come together to focus their efforts around the customer.
There’s an old Gartner statistic that personifies this well, and I still like to share it because I believe it’s relevant to this day: Ninety-five percent of companies collect customer feedback, yet only 10 percent use the feedback to improve, and only 5 percent tell customers what they are doing in response to what they heard.
It is no wonder why many customers feel that they are ignored. It drives me crazy when a company puts up walls in the form of no email to customer service, no phone numbers but then they send out a survey with each purchase and they want people to give them 5 stars or a 10 on NPS. They ignore Goodhart’s Law, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Or similarly, “Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once the pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.” - it makes me wonder if they want to know what the customer's experience really is.
There’s a lot of research out there that supports the fact that companies just aren’t using the data that they have available in-house to design and deliver a better experience for customers. You can analyze your data ad nauseam, but if you do nothing with it, you’re no better off—and neither are your customers.
The book gives the reader clear processes for mapping their customers journeys. There are several tools and services that anyone can use and the book does a great job of giving links to helpful resources.
Here is the Link to the Amazon book.
I had many highlights that were thought provoking including;
Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it isn’t so. –Lemony Snicket
If you don't infuse the customer into your business and into everything you do, then I don't know why you're in business.
Understanding is an art, and not everyone is an artist. –Unknown
Interaction Design Institute offers up a variety of options: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/ideation
Genroe has maintained a nice list of journey mapping platform comparisons, which can be found here: https://www.genroe.com/blog/journey-mapping-software/11058
