Kick start your customer experience analysis

Start your customer experience analysis today. I was asked last week by a company how they could improve their customer experience. There are a lot of things that can be done so I gave them a few points on how to get started.  

1. Touch Point Identification and Mapping

First, take a look at all the points of contact your customer has to your service, all the way from initial word of mouth, through flyers, website, marketing, through the contact with the actual service and then the follow up and after sales service. How do you as a company come into contact with your customers? Map all these as individual points, title them, set up a short description, and who is responsible for them internally. 

Physically map these out on a wall, use post-it notes, draw on a white board, whatever makes it visual. 

2. Customer characters.

Create typical client/customer characters, set up their demographics and the backstory (create a character that is a typical consumer for you). For example:  

Janice is a 45 year old female born and raised in Malaysia, she has three children likes indian food, but thinks it's too fatty to eat every day. Her children are her life.....etc. etc. 

 The goal of this is to create a character you as a company can empathize with. You will see that by giving the character little character traits you will put yourself into her position and see things from her perspective. Take a few people and brainstorm 3 of these customer characters. 

3. Touch Point Analysis / Gap Analysis 

Take your customer characters and map out the touch points again but then from her perspective. You can do this under the touch point map you created earlier. See things from the characters perspective. At every touch point, how does this affect her life? Does this make her happy, if yes why? Is this an annoying touchpoint? Think of the different color caps, positive, negative mindset etc. and feel what she feels. Note this down and note this down for all the characters.  

Once you have done this you should analyze each touch point. What is the difference between what the customers perspective is and what the company perspective is. Is there a gap? 

Also see if there are any missing touch points to make this a fluid customer experience, and see if there are too many touch points at a certain bit.  

Note: additionally I would interview some of your customers, to see what the actual experience was like. 

Continued

These initial exercises will already give you a wealth of information. You will see what the distance is between you and the customer. Now it might be tempting to fix the process touch point per touch point, but the most lasting way is to make structural changes. See how these touch points come into place, what are the structures behind them, who are the people responsible behind it. This is what should be restructured.  

Does this help your company? Can you see yourself applying this to your customer experience?