Will your Customer Journey Map (CJM) bypass the call centre?

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The ultimate aim of a business is to create a positive customer experience which produces an engaged customer – someone who is likely to make future purchases. For this reason the customer experience is increasingly seen as the key to competitive advantage in every industry.

Given the many channels through which customers can engage with a business, many organisations are building Customer Journey Maps (CJM) to help them to manage the customer lifecycle experience more effectively.  This graphical tool can be used strategically to understand the broad behaviour of an audience or applied tactically to specific marketing campaigns targeting segmented customer groups.

However, channel complexity now makes the task of maintaining happy, loyal customers an enterprise‐wide task.

Amazingly, despite the emergence of multi or omni‐channel marketing, the preferred channel of communication for many customers remains the telephone.  For example, after developing an omni‐channel presence one multinational entertainment organisation reported that regardless of the £millions they invested in marketing and sales every month above and below the line 90% of customers continued to make purchases over the phone.

This humble instrument remains the channel of choice in many sectors and a large amount of business‐critical intelligence can be leveraged from it to inform the mapping process and future success.  So whilst creating a CJM may sound daunting, many organisations are using telephone usage as an easy starting point.

The telephone is a source for significant insight wherever it remains the preferred or substantial channel for customer interaction. Telephone activity happens in real‐time. You get instant feedback from the telephone which means better and quicker decisions can be made. With call analytics filling the gap business leaders can have the assurance that their decisions are based on a more complete picture of their customers’ behaviour.

It is also important to plot all of a customer’s potential journeys through the business not just the call centre, taking into account real‐world. Customers (humans) can be both persistent and devious to get the outcome they desire. By the customer simply calling back an hour or two later and speaking to someone else can achieve a whole different outcome for the customer and the business for that matter.

The best outcomes can be achieved by combining a multi‐site call analytics system alongside a contact centre system. In this way, every site, group, team or individual across the business becomes in essence an “informal” contact centre or agent.  The aim is to deliver some of the features and reporting capabilities of a contact centre, and ensure the customers’ experience is tracked, monitored and handled correctly.

In this way, companies do not need to make huge technology investments to create their CJM and gain insight to customer behaviour. Evidence shows that simply displaying call data through a standard web browser enables staff to make informed responses and thus makes a big quantifiable difference to the quality of customer experience.

To read the new white paper on ‘Will Your Customer Journey Map Bypass the Call Centre? The Rise of the Customer-Centric Marketplace visit www.tollring.com/white-papers.html