Are you creating moments of magic or moments of misery for your customers?
COVID-19 accelerated digital transformation for several businesses but were they ready?
It was a crispy, sunny morning and I was meeting one of my good friends, Anne, for an actual coffee. It was a bit surreal having physical contact after several months of online meetings and virtual interactions. Our coffee conversation started with how our lives had changed — from trying to balance homeschooling (with kids popping up in online calls!) with work demands that now seemed to span for more than 12 hours in a day, every day.
We then got to how businesses were forced to adjust operating models (some companies that were predominantly B2B became B2B2C for example) and digitise their businesses. Companies had to quickly figure out how they would interact with their customers and employees digitally given the limited possibilities of physical interactions.
Some businesses did this smartly. They collaborated with partners to ensure their customers received excellent experiences both online and offline. Others tried to do everything by themselves and muddled things up pretty badly.
Anne talked me through a rather unpleasant experience with one of the major supermarkets. This got mapped into a customer journey map to understand where things went wrong and what could have been done to make her experience more frictionless.
Getting started — understanding the buyer
Before we map the journey it’s important to understand the customer persona, as different personas will have different experiences and journeys with your brand. So let’s have a go at bucketing Anne with other shoppers who are similar to her:
Persona name: Impatient Isis.
Persona characteristics: Female, 35–45 years, Married, 2+ kids, Senior management.
Buyer characteristics: Frequents physical supermarket stores. Has ordered electronically but not from supermarkets. Likes to ‘see and feel’ what’s being bought and doesn’t trust the supermarkets to do this well. Easily irritated and will speak their mind. After a quick and convenient shop.
Trolley size: Large, weekly.
Building the framework for the journey map
To keep this simple, we’ve used four journey phases: Pre-order, Placing the order, Receiving the order and Post-order
We’ve also included the following lanes in the map:
- The journey — the actual steps that a customer goes through.
- The customer’s emotional state as they progress through the journey.
- Moments of magic — thinking about what could be done to create a WOW moment for the customer.
- Moments of misery — thinking about what pain points the customer is experiencing and how we eliminate these.
- Touchpoints thinking about digital and physical touchpoints that the customer could interact with.
The pre-order stage: make it easy for your customers to find you
More and more companies are making it easier for customers to find their brand in the digital sea of competition.
How easy is it to find your brand through search engines, review sites and common social media channels?
How are you luring the customer to your brand over your competitors?
How are you leveraging social influencers and review sites to convince the customer to do business with you?
Placing the order: make it easy for your customers to understand and change what they’ve bought, how they can pay and how they can get their items
Placing the order started with the site being easily navigable. It was also easy for Anne to find the products she was interested in buying.
As a convenience shopper, she was super impressed she could choose a one-hour delivery slot that she could fit alongside her schedule (but more on this later).
Some areas for improvements include having better clarity on products and stock levels (more on this later!), incentives such as discounts and vouchers for first-time shoppers, and looking at how large purchasers could be rewarded with discount codes and/or free delivery.
The other significant improvement would be to have an easy way of addressing queries on the products or order process — chatbots could be a good solution for this.
Receiving the order: ensure the customer gets the delivery in the timeframe promised and that the order is complete and not damaged
This is when it started going downhill for Anne. The delivery never arrived at the promised delivery slot. This is a major pain point for the ‘Impatient Isis’ persona.
To further exacerbate the matter, it was impossible to get in touch with anyone at customer care to figure out where her delivery was.
Two hours later she gets the dreaded “Uko wapi?” call. She was not impressed! Luckily she was at home, else we suspect they would have charged her for redelivery.
Order issue resolution: resolve your customers’ issues quickly and fairly
There were several issues with the order with items either missing or damaged.
Again customer care was not contactable. If it wasn’t for the big smile of the delivery agent, I am sure Anne would have given him a serious piece of her mind.
Fortunately, she was called later on that day around 8 pm (erm, boundaries!). While the customer care agent did apologise, she indicated that they could not replace the missing or damaged items but she would be credited for them…and this is where Anne lost it. The credit would be added to her digital wallet only. She would not be reimbursed in any other way and this supermarket had effectively forced her to shop with her again to use up that credit.
Calls for common sense were largely ignored even by the customer care supervisors. There was no other way to pass this experience and frustration along to other decision-makers in the supermarket.
I am sure this supermarket had a rigorously documented standard operating procedures that their employees had to abide by.
They probably did not refresh them with the ‘rush to digitise’. The other problem with these kinds of procedural documents is that they are usually presented from an internal perspective and don’t necessarily articulate a customer’s emotions, motivations or intricacies.
If this supermarket had adopted journey mapping, they would have been able to identify and fix potential pain points and barriers in the online ordering and delivery service.
Closing thoughts
Brands may have missed out on ensuring their customers receive great experiences (online and offline) as a result of having to quickly digitise their businesses and adjust their operating models.
We’re unlikely to see a full demise of brick and mortar but digital touchpoints are going to increase. Brands need to ensure their customers are experiencing moments of magic while eliminating moments of misery, using feedback collection and journey mapping tools.
