Listening to Customers to Deliver the Ultimate Customer Experience
Understanding the customer journey to improve the customer experience is hot on most company’s lists of key initiatives. Customer journeys can be a powerful tool to help streamline and improve processes, minimize the amount of work that needs to be done, and leave your customers happy and satisfied in working with you.
In a recent article published by McKinsey titled Digitizing Customer Journey and Processes: Stories from the Front Lines, they use case studies from the financial industry to demonstrate how investing some time and resources to understand the experience of your customers can have on the performance of the organization.
Instead of relying on employees to represent the “voice of the customer”, one Latin American financial institution brought in actual customers to help them improve the experience they had in interacting with the bank. The authors of the article rightly say, “Bankers, however empathetic, are not customers, and the only reliable way to find out what customers want is to go and ask them.”
One critical piece that the article points out is that even though companies should bring in customers to redefine their experience, this is not to say that employees should not also observe and be part of the process.
Through a tight integration of an objective, third party vendor to facilitate the discussion and interactive exercises combined with employees who are listening to the experience firsthand – company’s can successfully deliver on an improved experience that benefits everyone. This type of partnership also helps deliver a quicker path to solutions as the team can discuss and iterate on ideas in real-time.
I would love to hear from you if want to chat about customer journey mapping and how Clearworks partners with companies to bring them closer to customers.
Karie Starett
karie@clearworks.net
