Customer Experience and The Journey of Bringing a Customer on Board
How companies need to re-invent their consumer experience strategy to deliver positive journeys?
The importance of this subject inside a company’s environment is highlighted by an Accenture study (1) which shows that “Improving the customer experience topped the list of business priorities companies have for the next 12 months”, referring firms such as Google, Amazon and KPMG. Anatoly Roytman, managing director Accenture Interactive, enhances the fact that:
The customer experience is “at the heart of digital transformation, and digital is at the center of that customer experience”
Costumer experience cornerstones
Nowadays customer experience takes a big role in a company management strategy, however, it is a topic built above the already known customer satisfaction, service quality and relationship marketing — concepts discussed since the late 60’s by authors such as Kotler, Howard and Sheth. Those components contributed to the formulation of the customer experience theory itself, however, the actual journey of the consumer relies much more on stimulus regarding the customer’s cognitive, behavioral, sensorial, emotional and social (2) responses, that will build up the consumer experience, creating an overall multidimensional journey that can bring positive outcomes such as:
· Consumer satisfaction and service quality;
· Trust and commitment;
· Customer engagement;
· Brand involvement and attachment;
· Loyalty.
The Consumer Purchase Journey
A positive experience is measured by the satisfaction of the consumer through the interaction in all touch points during the purchase journey — generating a dynamic process composed by three main phases: pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase.
Increasing Touchpoints, Increasing Complexity
Creating positive customer experiences can be a challenge due to the complexity and unpredictability of the human behavior specially when combined with the increasing number of touch points that arise during the consumer journey (3).
The origin of the touch point can be internal or external and has a different impact in each of the purchase phases:
· Brand-owned touch point
An internal touch point under the control of the company. Brand-owned media in which the marketing mix elements (eg., website, loyalty programs, etc.) are included on the journey of this touch point.
· Partner-owned media
Can include partners in communication, distribution, agencies, multivendor loyalty, all also controlled by the firm.
· Costumer-owned touch points
During the three phases of the journey, the consumer does several actions that are not under the control of the company or their partners. On the original paper, the authors give the example on the pre-purchase phase, when the consumer is “thinking about their own needs and desires”, or in the purchase phase, the “choice of payment method”.
· Social/external touch points
These social touch points are out of the control of companies and have great influence on consumers: other consumers reviews, peers’ influence, social media, independent information sources, among many others.
The diversity of touch points brings the need to analyze the consumer journey as a path seen with a funnel structure, following all the steps of interaction between clients and the company. The journey analysis also provided a greater knowledge about consumer insights and the creation of consumer-focused approaches. The rise of e-commerce as a channel created a challenge on this mapping process, putting more value in the online channels and changing the traditional consumer journey. Two new trends were created due to this new online capability:
· Showrooming: consumers search in store, but end up buying online;
· Webrooming: consumers search online, buy in store.
These situations and others are arising, mainly due to technological developments, but also to “search and purchase attribute advantages of specific channels, lack of lock-in in the channel during the purchase funnel and the presence of cross-channel synergies” (4) .
Despite being a new capability, mobile (5) is also bringing enormous changes to the traditional customer journey. However, mobile provides the ability to be time and location sensitive, which in a Marketing tactic point of view, can be a new and interesting touch point instead of just another channel!
Regardless of the amount of studies and papers about this subject, managing the consumer journey was never so hard. The digital era provides the empowerment of the consumer, the technological speed, and changes on human behavior, will continuously challenge companies’ management to put the customer wants and need in the center of their business strategies.
Measuring the experience for actionable insights
During the journey, customers are exposed to multiple touch points, each one having a specific impact on consumer behavior. Despite its complexity, it is imperative to be able to identify the touch points, the so called “moments of truth” that have the most influence on the consumer’s decisions, in order to generate actionable insights for the company.
The only way to create a strong consumer experience is to steer the focus towards a customer-centric strategy. The company should therefore seek to provide capabilities that allow a correct management and measurement of the Journey such as:
· Customer Satisfaction Surveys;
· Integrated CRM Systems;
· Online and offline Behaviour modeling;
· Social media intelligence (sentiment analysis);
· Multichannel analysis.
Regardless of the amount of studies and papers about this subject, managing the consumer journey was never so hard. The digital era provides the empowerment of the consumer, the technological speed, and changes on human behavior, will continuously challenge companies’ management to put the customer wants and need in the center of their business strategies.
This article is based on “Katherine N.Lemon & Peter C.Verhoef (2016), Understanding Customer Experience Throughout the Customer Journey” issued by the American Marketing Association, and was written by Marta Lobato, Joana Gama, Maria do Carmo Leitão e Marcos Amorim.
References
(4) Katherine N.Lemon & Peter C.Verhoef (2016), Understanding Customer Experience Throughout the Customer Journey. ©2016, American Marketing Association. ISSN: 1547–7185 (electronic).
