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From touchpoints to journeys: The competitive edge in seeing the world through the customer’s eyes
When most companies focus on customer experience
they think about touchpoints—the individual trans-
actions through which customers interact with parts
of the business and its offerings. This is logical.
It reflects organization and accountability, and is
relatively easy to build into operations. Companies
try to ensure that customers will be happy with the
interaction when they connect with their product,
customer service, sales staff, or marketing materials.
But this siloed focus on individual touchpoints
misses the bigger—and more important—picture:
the customer’s end-to-end experience. Only by
looking at the customer’s experience through his or
her own eyes—along the entire journey taken—can
you really begin to understand how to meaningfully
improve performance.
Customer journeys include many things that happen
before, during, and after the experience of a product
or service. Journeys can be long, stretching across
multiple channels and touchpoints, and often lasting
days or weeks. Bringing a new customer on board
is a classic example. Another is resolving a technical
issue, upgrading a product, or helping a customer
to move a service to a new home. In our research, we’ve
discovered that organizations that fail to appreciate
the context of these situations and manage the
cross-functional, end-to-end experiences that shape
the customer’s view of the business can prompt a
downpour of negative consequences, from customer
defection and dramatically higher call volumes
to lost sales and lower employee morale. In contrast,
those that provide the customer with the best
experience from start to finish along the journey can
expect to enhance customer satisfaction, improve
sales and retention, reduce end-to-end service cost,
and strengthen employee satisfaction.
This is especially true in today’s multitouchpoint,
multichannel, always-on, hypercompetitive consumer
markets. The explosion of potential customer inter-
action points—across new channels, devices, appli-
cations, and more—makes consistency of service
and experience across channels nigh impossible—
unless you are managing the journey, and not simply
individual touchpoints. Indeed, research we con-
ducted in 2015 involving seven EU telecom markets
found that when consumers embarked on journeys
that involved multiple channels their experience was
materially worse than during single-channel experi-
ences, whether those experiences were digital or not.
The trouble with touchpoints
Consider the dilemma that executives faced at one
media company. Customers were leaving at an alarming
rate, few new ones were available for acquiring in
its market, and even the company’s best customers
were getting more expensive to retain. In economic
terms, a retained customer delivered significantly
greater profitability than a newly acquired customer
over two years. Churn, due to pricing, technology,
and programming options, was an increasingly famil-
iar problem in this hypercompetitive market. So
was retention. The common methods for keeping
customers were also well known but expensive—
tactics like upgrade offers and discounted rate plans,
or “save desks” to intercept defectors.
So the executives looked to another lever—customer
experience—to see if improvements there could halt
the exodus. What they found surprised them. While
the company’s overall customer-satisfaction metrics
were strong, focus groups revealed that a large
number of customers left because of poor service and
shoddy treatment over time. “How can this be?”
one executive wondered. “We’ve measured customer
satisfaction for years, and our call centers, field
services, and website experience each score consis-
tently over 90 percent. Our service is great!”
As company leaders probed further, however, they
discovered a more complex problem. Most customers
weren’t fed up with any one phone call, field visit,
or other individual service interaction—in fact, most
customers didn’t much care about those singular
touchpoint events. What was driving them out the