Customer Journey: Build the best customer experience
In today's highly competitive market, people have a wide variety of brands or entities to turn to when they need a product or service. For a company...
It is no secret that a company's most important resource is its customers; the business's success depends on them, which is why the concept of customer experience has been gaining more and more presence. It has reached a point where departments and roles are directly focused on studying and improving it, such as consultants, analysts, researchers, managers, supervisors, and designers.
In addition, as time goes by, consumers have more and more access to touchpoints with companies through different channels and media, which means that the purchasing process is evolving in diversity and complexity. If that were not enough, social relationships have also become an important pillar. Today it is easy and almost essential to look for reviews, likes, and comments from previous buyers before purchasing a product or service.
Therefore, it is vital to involve areas like information technology, human resources, marketing, sales, customer service, logistics, and quality, among others, in projects dedicated to building, improving, and managing the customer experience. But how do you design a customer experience? In this blog, we will talk about it, and we are going to understand it through two key tools: the Customer Journey and the Moments of Truth.
What is Customer Experience?
To understand what Customer Experience is, let's review a few concepts:
An experience will result from the cognitive, emotional, behavioral, sensory, and social responses when having individual approaches to businesses. In other words, the Customer Experience is the perception that remains in your Buyer Persona when they go through their Customer Journey and is linked directly to the way they experience Moments of Truth.
What makes up the customer experience?
This is a topic that is still under study. All those elements that today we consider to be part of the customer experience are the result of research that began in the 1960s when the challenge of understanding the consumer decision-making process first arose. A decade later, evaluating customer perception, satisfaction, and loyalty to companies started. From the 1980s onwards, service quality came into play and became the focus of attention with the study of Customer Journey Maps. Still, it was not until the 1990s that the scope of what we know as customer experience was broadened, making it possible to study the effect of one element on the other.
Thanks to this, since the arrival of the new millennium, having Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has made it easier to study these effects. In the last decade, multidisciplinary challenges and placing the customer at the center of business have allowed today's experience design to have a pedestal within the processes of many companies. Remember, customer experience is a multidimensional construct that encompasses the cognitive, emotional, sensory, behavioral, and social responses that the consumer has to a product or service throughout the buying process. We are talking about the elements that make it up, all those that can trigger positive or negative responses in all these dimensions:
Blog: What is Customer Experience and what is it for?
Customer Journey
The Customer Journey is fundamental for design. Drawing it is the first step to identifying the Moments of Truth and analyzing how to improve them to strengthen the elements that make up the customer experience.
On our website, you will find more blogs about this tool. For practical purposes, here we will only highlight the phases that compose it and some of the moments contained in these stages:
As a consequence of the nature of the purchase, you should note that a consumer may need another product from the same brand (for example, from supermarkets, hardware stores, furniture stores, pharmacies, and restaurants, among others). So the Customer Journey becomes a cycle, and the post-purchase of a product or service becomes the pre-purchase.
Types of moments of truth
A vital element of these maps is identifying the moments of truth, which will help determine where to dedicate your efforts when designing the experience. To design, it is essential to know that there are different types of moments of truth:
How to improve the customer experience
With all this knowledge, I can tell you that there is no single way to design the Customer Experience, but I can give you a series of steps as a guide that can help you in the design process:
This blog contains very general information about what Customer Experience is, how to map it, understand it and improve it. However, do not forget to consider the elements that compose it so that you can view how your processes can generate positive responses from your customers during the design. Also, remember that there are social, physical, and digital environments where experiences occur and that we must prioritize those that are the preference of consumers. For this reason, it is still important to incorporate customers in the design process and conduct surveys, interviews, Focus Groups, Mystery Shoppers, and other activities that help you validate the hypotheses you are raising at each stage.
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