This article contains an unedited excerpt from our new book, Leading the Customer-led Revolution, due out in May. We hope you enjoy it!
If we could give one superpower to every organisation, it would be the capability to map out their main customer journeys against their existing business processes. This steps the level of customer empathy up a few notches. It helps you find gaps you never knew existed. It helps engage people from right across your organisation so they can begin to see how they play a part in your overall success.
Check out an excerpt from our book, Leading the Customer-led Revolution, below, to gain some initial clarity about understanding the customer journey, where you sit within it + the opportunities it can reveal to unlock new growth.
Customers Are On A Journey + You’re Only Part Of It
[Excerpt from Chapter 18 of our new book]
As a customer, you don’t just wake up one day + decide – I’m going to buy x product or service! For pretty much any transaction that takes place, the journey that leads up to that moment + the journey after that moment is much longer + more complex, depending on the product of course (no one puts that much thought into toothpaste, do they?).
And, here’s the rub. Your organisation is only a part of the wider customer journey. Sure, you may play a big role, but ultimately you don’t control it. If there’s one thing we’ve seen consistently in high-performing, customer-led organisations – it’s that they know where they stand with their customer + what they need to do to serve them.
The customer owns the customer journey. Your organisation owns the customer experience.
The customer owns the customer journey. Your organisation owns the customer experience.
This ‘ah-ha’ moment is huge. The only thing that you can control is the experience your organisation delivers to the customer. How well that supports their journey + whether they achieve their goals dictates the perception of how well you do what do you.
Those in the know put this in context + seek to understand what happens for the customer before + after they interact. By only looking at the moment a customer traverses through your front door (or homepage) + transacts, you’re missing the opportunity to capture more customers (before) + retain them (after). In fact, looking only at the middle bit, it becomes more about ‘customer service’ which is why so many organisations are limiting their potential today.
In working with a variety of businesses + organisations across sectors, one of the first questions we ask is, ‘Have you mapped out the customer journey?’
In many cases we hear a resounding ‘YES!’ However, it is the business processes that are mapped out from the organisation’s perspective – not from the customer’s view.
It’s the internal view – they do this step, then do that step, then fill in that form. This is not the customer journey. It is good practice, of course, + a foundation of business process reengineering, but it is about you – not the customer.
This article is an unedited excerpt from the upcoming book from authors Sueanne Carr + Peter Turner (aka the Dynamic Duo of Customer-led Transformation) titled, Leading the Customer-led Revolution, due out May 2023.
Written for courageous leaders who are in charge of or charged with making their organisation truly customer-led, it provides a simple + powerful roadmap to making it happen.
Join the waitlist here.
