The e-mail exchange with the customer care representative of the local postal entity, while rather forceful on my part, was progressing as smoothly as a customer complaint and response can be expected to flow, albeit with relatively prolonged delays in between one and the other.
In these COVID-19 days, nothing provides more convenience and customer satisfaction than being able to remain at home and still complain about some inferior service – whether perceived or even received. It can take place any time that is convenient for the customer and overcomes the current dangers of face-to-face encounters.
It is therefore not surprising to learn that according to a recent study by Hubspot (https://blog.hubspot.com/news-trends/live-chat-go-to-market-flaw), more than 60 per cent of customers tend to communicate with companies via e-mail for customer service. It is often a fast and efficient means with which to provide a quick reply to customer complaints. Unfortunately, this was not the best example of this benefit.
But the real cruncher, as they say, occurred somewhere across this prolonged exchange of e-mails, when the customer representative answering my latest e-mail suddenly informed me that: ‘[Title of service] can only be provided when completing form attached. Form has to be completed, requested postage of stamp affixed and sent to customer care for processing.’
It must be the feeling one would experience while skiing smoothly across the snow and suddenly encountering a massive crevice crossing one’s path, influencing the rest of the journey.
Admittedly, I found little consolation in the fact that the ‘attached form’ (obviously including ‘postage of stamp’} did not need to be delivered through conventional post.
‘Once form is completed you may forward to your local post office and they will send it to customer care by internal mail.’
In modern slang, this was an administrative (some would say bureaucratic) plunge from electronic mail to yesteryear’s snail mail.
The concept of a ‘customer journey’ (also known as a ‘user journey’), is generally defined as ‘the complete sum of experiences that customers go through when interacting with a business organisation.’ It is invariably a direct reflection of what customers want and expect when interacting with any business organisation and it is this very expectation and underlying sentiment that conditions and shapes the overall ‘customer experience.’
Most business organisations today chart out a customer journey map, a graphical and visual representation of a customer journey
Throughout this journey, customers can potentially go through quite a number of different critical interactions, known as ‘customer touchpoints,’ which have an enduring impact upon the complete experience. Such touchpoints can be direct, during which the company can affect the outcome and experience, or indirect, where there is much less control (e.g. word-of-mouth and comments on social media).
Most business organisations today chart out a customer journey map, a graphical and visual representation of a customer journey, to help them identify each touchpoint as well as help them understand and appreciate the journey better. The map narrates the story of a typical customer’s experience across all touchpoints. The objective is to gain insights into the pain-points that customers may experience and as a result allow the journey to be improved and optimised for an enhanced experience.
While seemingly a simple and straightforward undertaking, charting a customer journey can be quite complex given that the average consumer is today capable of using any of up to a dozen different channels to communicate with a business: from traditional to more modern. And while the customer journey map allows companies to get a holistic view of the various touchpoints, charting the various permutations and combinations can be quite a complex evaluation to perform, making it sometimes difficult to ensure a high-quality customer experience.
The modern client is a complex being to analyse, and in the current Digital Age, customer expectations have, and still are, undergoing major transformations. The current pandemic has only compounded the whole situation and brought to light the various corporate factors (more likely shortcomings) that influence these expectations.
Customers today have no hesitation starting a journey across one channel, migrating to another, and possibly ending up where they had originally started. As an example, a customer journey could start with a face-to-face encounter with a company’s representative, then move online through an exchange of e-mail, require the potential use of traditional telephony, skip to SMS or social media, and end up with a hopefully conclusive face-to-face encounter once again.
The challenge is for companies to be geared and flexible enough to manage such cross-channel communication while ensuring that the customer experience flows seamlessly across every channel utilised. Moreover, irrespective of how customers interact with a company, via social media, e-mail, telephony or other channels, the exercise of mapping the various potential customer journeys visually helps ensure no customer is lost or slips through the metaphoric cracks.
However, we should not overlook the fact that mapping customer journeys serves a second critical objective. Most business organisations, over time, often veer towards becoming inward-looking and relatively introspective. A company’s history often conditions today’s corporate decisions and business judgements. Charting visual customer journeys, therefore, helps businesses figuratively step into their customers’ shoes and perceive their business from the customers’ perspective rather from the point-of-view of what suits the company, or its employees, best.
In such cases, business organisation will be able to strategically assess and examine their own internal processes and align these across customer journeys to ensure that both complement and supplement each other towards a seamless experience from the customer’s viewpoint. It is not unusual, as is probably the case in the example mentioned above, that obsolete processes and procedures have not been updated sufficiently and as a result impact negatively upon the whole customer journey. The choice of altering the preferred communications channels should always remain in the hands of the customer and business organisations should never impose a change of channel merely because procedures or historical practices still dictate so.
Various studies on customer journeys describe how such graphical depictions help business organisations to understand, relate, and promptly build empathy for the customer. Gaps in the flow of these journeys, on the other hand, project a rather adverse image of the organisation and blemishes its overall reputation at a time when customers hold such a strong influence across social media.
Most people are already familiar with Charles Minard’s information graphic depicting Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812. A Customer’s journey, likewise, can be mapped across similar useful infographics depicting the path that customers can follow in their interactions and touchpoints with a business organisation. Hopefully, the story that such customer journey maps convey have a much better ending than Minard’s and hopefully with much less obstacles in the way.
Hadrian J Sammut is the Chief Officer, Advisory & Projects with the local firm of iMovo. He can be contacted on hadrian.sammut@imovo.com.mt.