Make the Moment of Truth Unforgettable (in a Good Way)
By Laurent Ghio, Product Marketing Manager, CX and SaaS, Quadient
Professionals in every industry know that customer demands are always changing and will continue to evolve. To secure continued success, it’s up to enterprises to identify and understand changing customer expectations and to adapt to them at the speed of market demand.
A recent report by Forrester found that customers today are willing to experiment, they want to be self-sufficient, they want to have information at their fingertips on the device of their choice at any given time. And they also have high expectations on when, how and why they engage through digital channels, phone, printed material or even meet face-to-face with a company representative. The availability—or lack—of these options is part of the overall customer experience.
Needless to say, providing a positive customer experience is easier said than done. Many organizations struggle to keep up with changing customer demands. They continuously invest in modernizing their infrastructure, platforms, IT systems and operations. Often this involves dealing with a complex ecosystem of internal and external stakeholders (including customers), all of whom play a part in providing or receiving the information that makes up the customer journey. With limited time and resources, CIOs and CDOs have to prioritize how they can best support their organization’s objectives.
Customer experience (CX) initiatives belong among these priorities. Misalignment between customer expectation and the experience being delivered can influence whether customers continue to do business with your organization or to switch to the competition. This possibility increases significantly as the misalignment grows broader. Customer loyalty depends on a satisfying customer experience because the experience drives intense emotions. Feeling valued, understood and respected are strong positive emotions that inspire customer loyalty, especially at the “moments of truth.”
Moments of truth occur at different times in different industries and organizations. They are the critical touchpoints that deeply engage your customer, such as the moment a customer discovers your product or service, their decision to buy or not, whether or not the delivered product or service lives up to expectations, and so on. Giving customers a positive experience means driving those positive emotions through the touchpoints throughout the customer journey. To do this, you must make it easy for customers to get the information they need, as well as efficiently provide customers with support in the moments they need it.
A study of making the moment of truth unforgettable (in a bad way)
Perhaps the best way to show how to successfully address the moment of truth is to give an example of what it looks like when an organization misses the mark: A colleague recently made an appointment with a healthcare provider. She was directed to a website to fill out nine separate documents before the appointment, but there was no way to submit the completed forms through digital channels. She called the provider and was advised to print them out and fax them. Like most modern consumers, she did not have easy access to a fax machine, nor did she want to go through the effort and time involved in standing by a fax machine. Finally, she simply showed up for her appointment and in the waiting room, was asked to fill out all nine questionnaires a second time. For her, this was not a positive experience.
In this example, the customer goes through a lot of effort and complexity to achieve what should be a simple task. There are too many steps, it’s time consuming and it’s not relevant to modern ways of obtaining information or interacting today. Email or some other online approach at the website would have completely turned this experience around.
How can this—and similar situations across all industries—be made easier, quicker and more efficient or even enjoyable for the customer? Customer journey mapping can help.
Proactive steps to take for stellar moments of truth
You probably already know it’s important to involve senior management early in the process and familiarize them with the Customer First approach. This is the key because if you change the mindset, you change the culture of the organization. Only then can you effectively work on the technology and your back-end processes.
Second, management names a CX leader, and he or she must build a team to work on the different aspects of observations, deciding on KPIs and metrics, identifying the pain points, drawing the maps and so forth. My recommendation is to involve no more than three departments at once because when you start, you need to show success, and this usually comes through small changes, “quick hits” at first, rather than attempting major operational changes.
Next, you need to agree on some personas. Traditional marketing uses demographic clusters, but in the CX world, personas are defined according to their behaviors and expectations. For example, you may have a customer who makes a single query or purchase over several months, and one who deals with your organization weekly or even daily. Begin with only two or three personas, though some large corporations may develop hundreds over time.
Next, map the customer experience for the persona you’ve selected. This should be based on both physical and digital touchpoints, because customers often interact with a company through a variety of channels: the website, email, letters, phone communications and face-to-face. All of that needs to be taken into account when mapping the customer journey.
The goal is to identify the customer’s pain points and to design a new, more positive journey. What can you change to make the process easier and more convenient for the client, to make interactions more satisfying? Very likely your efforts won’t be entirely on target the first time, but it’s important that all employees align their effort to this new mindset: the Customer First.
Finally, you’ll need to map the metrics. Once you’ve defined the elements of the journey, track the trends of, for instance, the number of calls to the call center, or more or fewer sales. Add different KPIs to your map to use as reference points as your CX program goes forward. The KPIs help to monitor if your improvements have positive or negative impacts.
Then continue to iterate the process and, over time, you’ll know if what you’ve changed is appreciated by your clients, because you’ll get their feedback—and hopefully their loyalty.
Moments of truth are make-or-break opportunities and delivering in these moments creates a strong long-term relationship with your clients, while failing to deliver has the opposite impact.
