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A Customer Journey In Shoes

by Justin G. Poggioli, Senior Manager, West Monroe Partners - November 18, 2015

A Customer Journey in Shoes


The Journey

    I am an Amazon.com devotee mostly because the ease of purchase and their delivery cannot be matched. However, there are some things, like shoes, that I have never purchased online because I do appreciate the tactile component of shopping. How the shoe fits, how do my pants break across the top, and did I mention how does it fit? I took the plunge and purchased a pair of Allen Edmunds from Amazon, using Prime of course. Two personal firsts: I had never purchased shoes online, nor had I purchased a pair of Allen Edmunds.

    After a work week of heavy wear (with heavy wear defined as walking 3 miles a day) my pinky toes were unhappy. I thought about returning the shoes to Amazon but I didn’t know how that would work considering I had walked nearly 15 miles in them, besides, I really liked them! I was unsure if I had purchased the wrong size or if it was just this model. Not to mention I was nowhere near home. I was 1,300 miles away from the original shoebox, the cloth slip-covers, and the packaging needed to ship the shoes back. Luckily enough, I was working near an Allen Edmunds store and I decided to stop by. My experience was amazing. No sooner did I finish describing the problem I was experiencing, the sales person had a solution. He whisked my shoes into the back room to slightly stretch them while I chatted with a sales associate about the NY Giants. A few minutes later and Voila! The shoes are as comfortable as I had read online and Allen Edmunds gained a customer for life.

Customer Journey Mapping

    This experience begins to describe a customer journey with a retail company like Allen Edmunds. Mapping your customer’s journey requires you to suspend what you think you know about how your customer interacts with your business. Also, if you have never been through the exercise of journey mapping a simple example like this is a good place to start. I started my journey by reading reviews of the product both on their website as well as independent review sites and blogs. I made my purchase via an ecommerce provider on my mobile phone. I received the product at my home but used the product 1,300 miles away. I then walked into a store front which had no connection in the process at all but asked them to solve my problem.

    While this journey may not match your business model, the nodes within this particular customer journey are probably a good starting point to understand why customer journey mapping is important. We have the following nodes in this customer’s simple journey example:

· Pre-sale/Discovery period – When a potential buyer is educating themselves regarding your product and possibly comparing it to a competitor.

· Purchase or first engagement – Multiple channels to purchase a product are common and generally, the more you have, the less control you have of that first engagement. First impressions are lasting.

· Dissatisfaction – Is there a quality problem, a gap in customer expectations, or something else?

· Problem Resolution Opportunity – This is the point at which lifetime customers can be won. What was this experience like? Did it take multiple contacts for a resolution to be found? Was the employee empowered to solve the problem?

· Resolution – Companies need to stay in business and follow appropriate policies for handling customer problems. However, the customer needs satisfaction and resolution.

    During my journey with the company, there were several instances that stuck with me and influenced my decisions leading me to the penultimate node in many customer experience journeys, the Problem Resolution Opportunity. It was during the Pre-sale/Discovery period when I was reading reviews and searching the website that I came to learn the company had brick and mortar stores. It was also during the Pre-sale/Discovery period that I came to learn of the reconditioning program for their shoes which signaled to me that this business focuses on the longevity and revitalization of their product.

    Contact center leaders have the potential to spearhead customer journey mapping initiatives because when all else fails, customers pick up the phone. The ideal customer journey would usually not have a Problem Resolution Opportunity node but when they occur, contact centers are uniquely positioned to collect caller intent. Collecting intent is critical to improving your customer’s journey because Problem Resolution Opportunities can be quantified. If a contact center receives a statistically significant number of Problem Resolution Opportunities which are similar in nature, that opportunity should feed into the overall business in order to make improvements. For instance, if a company receives requests asking for the nearest store location there may be an opportunity to automate that function using a website or Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. If a store locator function already exists then we can look at reasons why requests are still occurring. Perhaps the service is not readily accessible or it is not functioning as it should. Another example may be around simple customer education. In this example, my only solution was to return the purchase, but there was another solution available which met my needs.

    Knowing your customer’s journey is the first step to creating a cohesive and pleasant customer experience regardless if the contact point is a store, website, or contact center. Quality control issues can be caught sooner, gaps in education of the customer can be remediated, communication can be improved or clarified, and until the actual business problem is solved, the agents receiving the contact can be properly trained on a resolution which meets the needs of the business and the customer. The starting point is truly understanding your customer’s journey.

    Appropriate data collection and analysis combined with a deep understanding of your customer’s journey can yield a very mature contact center with elevated customer satisfaction across the business. Once you achieve that, you can make iterative improvements to the customer journey based on the data continuously collected. As everyone knows, retaining a customer is more cost effective than acquiring a new one. The contact center is well positioned to start and improve the customer’s experience via journey mapping.

 
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