One of the end-goals of digital transformation is the ability to deliver your business’ core offering better, faster and for less money than ever before—and, whatever product or service you provide, your true core offering is meaningful, seamless experiences for your customers.
According to McKinsey, customer satisfaction with new products is the second-most important innovation metric for businesses. Digital maturity requires, then, both a deep understanding of the customer journey and a business strategy that aligns with that journey.
What are some signs that your strategy isn’t quite aligned with your customers’ journey? Maybe you’ve realized that you’re working on assumptions when it comes to how happy customers are with your digital platform experience, rather than data. Or maybe you’re seeing a high volume of negative customer-experience feedback: social media chatter, low retention, NPS scores, lots of customer support tickets, and other signals.
By creating and following a strategic roadmap for your business’ CX transformation, you can turn customer service from a ball-and-chain into a revenue-generating unit.
This will involve asking and answering some key questions. Broad ones, like “are customers delighted by our brand experience?” And specific ones, like “is there a self-service portal for a customer to get the information they need?”
It will also likely mean introducing some new tools to your tech stack. For example, behavior mapping software like Hotjar can show you where your viewers go on the site, and where they encounter dead ends. Survey tools allow you to solicit customer feedback in real-time and adjust quickly.
Ultimately, digital maturity requires a business strategy that is aligned with your customer journey. By delighting users who visit your website, app, or other platforms, you’ll gain their trust, their business, and their loyalty.
With CX continuing to be the main area for competition between brands, it can be hard to ascertain what your key focus should be, especially if you have a limited marketing budget. But with a methodical approach, you can tackle one step at a time until you see the full picture.
Developing a customer-centric digital business strategy starts with building a customer journey map that covers the entire customer journey. Based on those findings, and the gaps you identify in how you’re tracking against the journey, you can then put strategies in place.
We approach the process of creating a CX vision and roadmap with a few key milestones in mind.
First, representatives from across your organization should establish the current business goals, and what metrics define success (KPIs).
Next comes the customer experience review. Through a series of meetings, you ascertain the current customer experience and touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey (not just the current digital touchpoints with your platform).
The following milestone to hit is the creation of a CX map, an updated customer journey with actionable digital initiatives that can be implemented to help improve your CX. Informed by qualitative and quantitative research, these initiatives can include content, UX enhancements, website features, mobile apps, and beyond. Nothing should be off the table at this point.
Finally, you’ll want to develop a prioritized roadmap. Taking the output from the CX map, you’ll identify the most important initiatives to pursue, based on your initial business drivers: which ones will provide the greatest value for the least amount of effort? This prioritized roadmap should be reviewed once a quarter to ensure it’s up to date with any business-goal changes.
Through this accelerated roadmap process, you’ll be able to understand what customers need and build your business around the customer journey.
When we started working with LOSSAN, a transit agency in California, they knew that the website for their Pacific Surfliner train service fell short when it came to customer-centricity. To compete in the minds of Californians with the state’s prevalent car culture, the Pacific Surfliner site needed to be experience-driven, engaging, and personally relevant to users.
The website for a train service must be, primarily, a functional experience for customers looking to find specific information and purchase tickets. But functionality does not need to supersede other considerations that LOSSAN knew their customers were looking for when they came to the website for a famously beautiful train route: inspiration, exploration, and personal touches all mattered as well.
Our work with LOSSAN was not an end-to-end digital transformation. But through a CX vision workshop, we developed a roadmap for targeted improvements to the Pacific Surfliner site—website personalization tools and an elevated, streamlined customer experience—that increased the agency’s digital maturity and helped boost quarterly referral sales by 40-50%.
Infuse customer-centricity into your digital business strategy. Talk to us about doing CX Vision and Roadmap Accelerator workshop with Nansen.
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