Currently, businesses are focussing much of their effort on understanding the entire customer experience, but as with former customer initiatives, they frequently fail to see any significant ROI. 

A lack of employee engagement and true ownership of the experience undoubtedly play significant roles in undermining the effectiveness of CX activity. 

However, a more fundamental problem is the organisation’s lack of understanding of what really drives customer behaviour. Their focus is primarily on the tangible, easy to measure aspects (like speed of service and staff attitude), with little attention paid to how customers truly  feel  about their experience; critically, it is emotions that are the catalyst for the customer behaviours desired by the business, such as increased purchasing, longevity of patronage, and recommendation to others. 

With businesses now recognising the need for employees to  think  like customers, there has been a significant rise in the popularity of CJM. 

Unfortunately, we have frequently witnessed the efforts put in to understand the customer journey resulting in what amounts to a purely academic exercise; the outputs contribute little to an improved experience and undermine the credibility of CX activity. Let’s explore some of the problems: 

• focus is on organisational process and departmental function, rather than examining all areas which inform and build the customer’s view of the experience 
• being created in isolation by internal leadership functions, there is little, if any, engagement with those employees actually delivering the experience
• senior stakeholders fail to clearly define the outputs required or provide the guidance and support essential to enable employees to think like a customer. 

Allied to these is the enduring search for the big-fix – that big-ticket initiative that will revolutionise CX delivery. Organisations fail to grasp that it is invariably the little things that irritate customers the most, such as not returning a call as promised, having to provide the same information multiple times, waiting for an important update before they can decide next steps, and so on. 

CXL Cycle – delivering real value from your CJM activity 

Our Customer Experience Journey Mapping approach is a simple, easily assimilated, but powerful method of analysing the current ‘tragics’ in your customers’ experience; more importantly, developing effective mechanisms to address these going forward. 

Our workshops build on current customer insight and truly engage front-line staff in reviewing the experience from the customers’ perspective, identifying those ‘paper-cuts’ along the way; observing and appreciating customers’ emotions throughout. 

Typically, our clients have found that around 80% of the improvement ideas generated using  CXL Cycle  are easy and economical to implement – and have a significant impact on the customer experience. Savings of five or even six figures have been achieved as clients using CXL Cycle have adopted remarkably simple changes to the way they work. 

Additional uses 

As well as providing a method of directly reviewing your current experience, CXL Cycle can also be used to: 

• provide a mechanism to engage all staff and create major cultural change 
• design out ‘pain-points’ in the development of new products and services 
• engage with customers in reviewing the outputs of CX improvement activity or new services 
• bring a focus on CX to internal functions such as HR, Finance, Marketing, etc., to improve the relationship with other customer-facing functions.