Customer journey management: A deep dive into the craft of experience engineering
Release news:Dear Customers, This document applies for customer with CommandCenter 2.0 enabled in their organization. Coming with new UI and UX controls, 2.0 deals with enhanced functions for a seamless customer journey management. Click here to view the list of changes we've made for 2.0. If you are an existing customer using 1.0 and like what you are seeing, please write to us at support@zohocrm.com to get them migrated. If you'd like to refer to the 1.0 resources, kindly click here.
Customer journey management: An overview
Customer hospitality—be it for any industry—is a key differentiator when it comes to its success. How you receive your customer into your landscape, what kind of facilities you are making for their seamless movement across different touchpoints, what types of personalization and customization possibilities are made available, and how their queries, grievances addressed are among factors that will determine their experience and loyalty to your business.
Let's imagine an example to understand this from the customer point of view.
Steve, a customer with a goal to purchase a bean bag, enters a furniture and home essentials store. The store is massive, and he can't spot the bean bag section right upon entry.
Instead of stacking them on the racks, they displayed their available range of bean bags near a suitable sofa and rug as an arrangement. This helped Steve see the function and aesthetic of the product.
This is one offline example of Steve's journey, whose path the retailer orchestrated, while Steve chose the direction based on his purchase goals.
- From the first instance, he was guided by meaningful touchpoints.
- The retailer enabled him to visualize his needs by strategic product placement of the bean bag, sofa, and rug.
- Steve was given chip-based Cart IDs, so he didn't have to lug around the plump bean bag around the store: Convenience.
- Upon a single swipe of the cart IDs, the products were summoned on a conveyor belt to the register: Automated actions.
These are a collection of arrangements (connected experiences) orchestrated by a thoughtful retailer to satisfy customers like Steve (Customer satisfaction). The next time Steve needs furniture, this is the store that he will come to (Customer loyalty).
This chain of experience that the customer gets exposed to in your business is called the Journey, and orchestrating them strategically is part of Journey Management.
The ability of a business to track their customer movements, understand their experiences, maneuver a favorable path, and measure their end-to-end experience for each customer interaction from a centralized source of control is called journey management.
Steve’s example is proof of how a thoughtful journey can delight a customer. Now, let’s get behind the scenes and explore how implementing such journeys can benefit a business.
Zylker is an online store that make and sell sustainable line of clothing and apparels across the country. From design to delivery, they have different teams with multiple people and different tools for various purposes. Although, customer centricity is their prime focus, they often stumble with consistency in CX.
Following are their roadblocks:
- Lead nurturing: As a result of their effective marketing outreach, they were able to attract quality leads. However, they are unable to nurture their leads effectively. Primarily because of the collaboration gap between the sales and marketing team.
- Order processing to shipping: Responsiveness is a responsibility. What happened to an order, where in the manufacturing process is the order, how long it will take to pack and ship, and who's the carrier are among the timely updates businesses must provide their customers to keep anxiety at bay. However, as you can imagine, if order processing, factory notification, design initiation, production, and supply chain. Even if they are all different teams working together, the customer might not have the visibility about the product they paid for, thereby causing agitation, frustrations, and escalations.
- Post-sales engagement: After a sale is over, a business should try and get customer feedbacks and engage with them for advocacy. Owing to the miscommunication during the processing phase, Zylker is finding it hard to connect with customers post-sales. This will affect their future relationship.
As you can see, like dominoes, fragmented customer experience will cause consecutive poor experiences throughout a customer's lifecycle.
To fix this, the business should unify their teams, establish centralized goals, and, most importantly: knit together their processes, tools, and data.
In other words, manage customers' journey inside and out of your business.
A well-planned journey—be it micro or macro—transforms your business at a massive scale. It will:
Amplify customer experience and brand perception: CX explains the character of a brand. When a meaningful journey is orchestrated, the experience becomes consistent across each touchpoint, thereby elevating customers' overall experience. In addition, it will also enhance brand perception, leading to good brand reviews.
Elevate operational rigor: Friction in day-to-day operations is an impediment to quality, agility, and adeptness. Creating end-to-end journeys will optimize operational rigor. It helps you meet deadlines, catch errors, and mitigate deviations. The customer will receive uniform offerings and communication at each stage.
Dissolve silos: When a journey is properly etched, it connects all departments and processes, thereby breaking silos, unifying teams, and maintaining the promised turnaround time.
Cut cost spillage: Effective journey management practices help identify broken and unproductive touchpoints. Knowing and acting upon the friction points will significantly diminish cost spillage.
Enhance customer loyalty: A friction-free journey means the customer feels no fuss. This means the customer is not bothered at any stage with roadblocks, so they come back to do business with you without any second thought.
So, how do you craft a perfect journey for your customers?
Crafting customer journeys
When it comes to crafting journeys, there is no one size fits all. Journeys are built based on the average best of total journeys taken on your business. That said, before you start crafting journeys, there is a set of groundwork and a post-examination needs to be done to call it "journey management."
The following are key-concepts of journey management:
Discover existing journeys: Journey discovery is the most important, primary step in the journey management effort. It will help you identify and understand how customers are approaching your business, how each of them moves around inside your business landscape, and how many paths were taken. From roadblocks to traffic joints, finding paths taken in your business will give you a comprehensive vision of your customers' behavior and personas, and the experience they have with your business. It acts as a record of customers' trail on your business.
Orchestrate journeys: Journey orchestration is the next step in journey management. This is where you build journeys for your customers. The make or break of a deal will largely be dependent on the journey you create. To make a difference and create a memorable experience for your customers, you need an important ingredient: empathy. As a business owner, empathizing how a customer might feel interacting with a particular touchpoint will help you come up with creative, strategic actions.
Journey analysis: Frequent measurement of the efficacy of your crafted journeys is as important as creating journeys itself. It is a testimony to your organization's growth: it will show if your orchestrated journeys are a success or not.
We saw what journey management is, the characteristics of a good journey management practice, and how beneficial it is to have one.
This is the very premise of Zoho CommandCenter.
Zoho CommandCenter
CommandCenter is a robust tool that help manage customer journeys. Like a control center, it offers an expansive view on your prospects' current movements, helps orchestrate experiences, and measures customer experience via their journeys.
Interested to learn the core logic behind CommandCenter?
Check out our exploratory article on Finite State Machine
Check out our exploratory article on Finite State Machine
Delve deeper into Zoho CommandCenter and their components: Path Finder, Journey Builder, Records, and Analytics
Want to implement this in your setup?Explore our setup guides for Path Finder and Journey Builder
Access your files securely from anywhere
Zoho CRM Training Programs
Learn how to use the best tools for sales force automation and better customer engagement from Zoho's implementation specialists.
Zoho DataPrep Personalized Demo
If you'd like a personalized walk-through of our data preparation tool, please request a demo and we'll be happy to show you how to get the best out of Zoho DataPrep.
- Zoho Workerly Home
- Forums
- Connect With Us:
- Zoho Recruit Home
- Forums
- Connect With Us:
New to Zoho Writer?
Create. Review. Publish.
New to Zoho CRM Plus?
Deliver unforgettable customer experiences
New to Zoho CRM Plus?
Deliver unforgettable customer experiences
New to Zoho Marketing Plus?
Everything you need to run your marketing
New to Zoho Marketing Plus?
Everything you need to run your marketing
You are currently viewing the help pages of Qntrl’s earlier version. Click here to view our latest version—Qntrl 3.0's help articles.
New to Zoho Survey?
Zoho Sheet Resources
Zoho Forms Resources
New to Zoho Sign?
Zoho Sign Resources
Sign, Paperless!
New to Zoho TeamInbox?
Zoho TeamInbox Resources
New to Zoho ZeptoMail?
Design. Discuss. Deliver.
New to Zoho Workerly?
New to Zoho Recruit?
New to Zoho CRM?
New to Zoho Projects?
New to Zoho Sprints?
New to Zoho Assist?
New to Bigin?
Related Articles
Introduction to Zoho CommandCenter
Release news: Dear Customers, This document applies for customer with CommandCenter 2.0 enabled in their organization. Coming with new UI and UX controls, 2.0 deals with enhanced functions for a seamless customer journey management. Click here to ...Orchestrating customer journeys using Journey Builder
Give your customers a friction-free experience all along their sales journey From receiving a lead in your business to converting them as a contact and closing a deal with them, your prospect is interacting with one business entity—your brand. And, ...Path Finder: Discover customer journeys
Journey Discovery: Overview Digital transformation is changing the game of commerce—both for customers and businesses. For one, the landscape is changing. Businesses now own multiple channels to interact with their prospects and customers. Your ...Setting up Path Finder
You can decipher from its name—Path Finder help find customers' paths taken in your business. Your business infrastructure is a multi-layered maze through which your customers enter and exit in a non-linear fashion. On one side you have different ...
New to Zoho LandingPage?
Zoho LandingPage Resources