Applying Intelligent Design to the Customer Journey

Travelling recently on Singapore’s Mass Rapid Transit network (MRT), I was impressed by the steps that MRT is taking to help make customer journeys as effortless as possible.

Serving millions of customers across the network daily, it’s critical that passengers are able to enter and leave trains as efficiently as possible. In addition to screen doors to enhance safety, MRT also uses clear and colour-coded platform signage to ease the inevitable bottlenecks around carriage entrances.

This simple visual guide provides a great way of encouraging courteous and efficient passenger behaviour, with exiting passengers taking priority over those waiting on the platform. It’s simple, yet so powerful, and provides a great way of reducing the frictions associated with busy daily commutes.

MRT’s impressive graphics also started me thinking about the challenges of designing seamless customer journeys. It would be great if some of the bottlenecks that customers encounter when engaging with organisations could be dealt with in the same way.

Businesses owe it to their customers to use the latest analytics techniques to really investigate those design or process flaws that can add to overall customer effort levels. Sometimes it’s a broken process that makes things difficult for customers and drives unnecessary demand into customer contact channels. A lot of times, however, it’s simply bad design that’s fuelling customer dissatisfaction.

Organisations need to take a more integrated view, as quite often the individual components of the customer journey might seem fine, but they don’t really work from an end-to-end consumer perspective. Speech and text analytics tools will help here in picking up on those areas that are causing frustration, while the tactical deployment of virtual agents or adding a click-to-chat option to web pages or on each new app screen can quickly start to resolve bottlenecks.

Just as with the Singapore MRT, intelligent design makes a real difference to the customer journey and that’s really important in Singapore’s sweltering heat!