Written by Amélie Van Hoecke
This summer, our journey started with an unexpected snag - a car window breakage. Right at the beginning of our trip, we were determined to swiftly address this issue. Imagine being on vacation, your plans disrupted, stuck at a police station and a repair shop, in a country where English is not evident. At such times, providing impeccable customer experience becomes a non-negotiable.
As we were driving a leased car, there were quite some actions needed to ensure everything was done in the right way. Our experience in ensuring all these handlings was quite interesting.
Upon contacting the lease company, they promptly created a file after guiding us through the required steps. However, subsequent calls yielded inconsistent information. Despite using the same phone number (a total of 5 times), we had to repeat our case number and story each time again. A unified view was lacking for their agents.
In contrast, when we called the window repair company, they effortlessly accessed a comprehensive overview of the car, insurance, and contact information. All it took was sharing our name and license plate. Multiple inquiries to them resulted in consistent responses, aided by our phone number-based identification. While agent service quality varied, the information provided remained steady, giving us a sense of progress.
The Customer Experience Problem
This scenario isn't unique; numerous companies struggle with similar issues. A lack of cohesion between customer data, processes, and systems are hindering synergies. This results in a fragmented customer experience where information isn't shared seamlessly among different touchpoints. It often leads to customers having to repeat information, inconsistent customer support, and a sense of frustration at customer side. Bridging this gap is vital to provide efficient and consistent service, as exemplified by the disparity between the experiences with the lease company and the window repair company. Aligning customer information and streamlining internal processes can lead to improved customer satisfaction, smoother operations and above all happy customers that become ambassadors for your brand.
Tackling the customer experience problem?
There are different approaches and aspects to pay attention to when working on these issues. One approach BrightWolves uses to support our clients in creating an outstanding customer experience, is by mapping the customer journey to their processes, technology & data.
By mapping the business processes, which is focused on what the employee needs to do to achieve a specific organizational outcome, to the customer journey, you ensure it is inherently embedded in every step. Putting the technology layer on top, you ensure that all the necessary steps are covered by a capability or system. The glue keeping this all together, should be the data. By doing this, you create a framework for alignment of the customer journey steps with the business processes, and the technologies used to facilitate them.
Take the use case of implementing a new system. To be able to know what capabilities you exactly need to implement, you need to understand the different steps to go through in this system; called the business processes. A pitfall when designing these business processes is ignoring or forgetting the impact of the steps and how they are impacting the customer journey and customer experience. Bringing in the data glue will enable you to understand in every business process step, or every customer journey step, which technology should support them and which data is generated or used.
This approach will not entirely solve the problem above, but it will give the lease company in this case, the framework and awareness of where the data and certain steps are needed to allow the best and more consistent customer experience.
Want to know more on how to ensure the best experience for your customer? Don't hesitate to contact Sven Van Hoorebeeck!