Taking an Outside-In Approach to Create Roadmaps Based on Actual Customer Experiences

Organisations always talk about how they’re committed to improving the Customer Experience, but how should they actually set about this critical task?

With such a range of different technologies and approaches available, it’s often daunting for Marketing, Digital and Contact Centre leaders to understand exactly what steps they should take to achieve results.

Unfortunately, there’s still a tendency among customer service teams to pursue traditional technology roadmaps rigorously, without really stopping to think about the customer journey they’re crafting – and the impact that it’s having on engagement.

Customer Journey Mapping can play a key role here by helping organisations to break through restrictive CRM processes and focus on the most broken aspects of engagement. At Sabio we work to focus on the customer ‘Corridor’, helping to really understand what systems and processes look like from the customer perspective.

This always starts by experiencing what the organisation looks and feels like from the outside. It’s common sense, but it’s surprising just how many businesses overlook this perspective. How much of the experience is actually value creating, and how much is wasted by forcing customers to endure overly complex or broken processes?

By breaking the customer journey down, you can start to build the kind of detailed UX-based roadmaps that offer a more seamless experience and reduced customer effort. Key to this is the ability to focus in on those parts of the journey that are broken. It’s important to be able to prioritise here, concentrating initially on those channels where engagement is highest.

Effective analytics will prove particularly valuable, with both speech and web analytics helping to deliver a more comprehensive perspective – showing where customers are actually struggling during interactions. A combination of approaches will succeed in offering both quantitative and qualitative insight – identifying not just that customers are dropping out at a particular web page or contact centre journey, but also clearly capturing how this experience makes them feel.

Today’s smart organisations recognise that developing true UX-based roadmaps will always be an iterative process. Identifying and resolving key customer frustrations will of course only serve to surface the next tranche of issues. UX mapping needs to become an integral part of the continuous improvement process, effectively fine-tuning journeys to keep on addressing residual customer effort and frustrations.

Where possible, it also helps to combine these customer experience roadmaps with the flexibility of a development environment such as Avaya’s Engagement Development Platform (EDP). Avaya EDP allows you to fine tune your organisation’s engagement strategy – with snap-in capabilities – such as real-time speech analysis or click-to-call functionality – that allow your engagement experts to keep focused on customer needs rather than communications solutions or protocols.