CX to JX — Customer Experience to Journey Experience

There is nothing better than the emotions and feelings one can receive from setting out on a Journey. Journeys help us to remember, enchants our minds, and helps us to come back and do it again.

Keeping that emotional attachment towards the journey, now organizations have started enhancing customers' experience towards a journey that a customer will traverse using various digital touch-points. So lets get started defining CX and see how we journey towards JX.

What is CX — Customer Experience?

The US Firm Forrester defines a customer experience strategy as a “Plan that guides the activities and resources allocation needed to deliver an experience that meets or exceeds customer expectations .”

Drivers of CX

• Personalization — Organisations collect a lot of data about their customers — their preferences, habits, buying patterns and so on. When a customer deals with an organization they expect a personalized customer experience. Customers expect the organization to be on their side of need. That is achievable by only personalizing the content, the application you are building for the customers.
• Mobility — Customers want to access data and get meaningful results when they are on the move. If the organization does not keep up then the customers will leave them behind.
• Self-Service — Give the power to customers to choose and decide what they want. The days are bygone when opening an account requires someone’s help. Moreover, self-service gives them 24/7 access to data that they want to see.
• Ease — Make the UI more easy and simple. Cluttered UI will increase confusion in customer behavior and will make them frustrated to use the app.
• Timeliness — Make the UI light so that responsiveness is high and there is no lag in the app. It annoys the customer if there is a loading spinner for more than 30 seconds.

Designing the Experience and Mapping the Journey

A lot of times, people don’t know what they want, until you show it to them

To design the journey that customers want, segment them based on their demography, buying patterns, customer value. Create personas based on the segmentation that you have done. Get on the whiteboard and use sticky notes to call out the persona profile, behavior, needs.

Then its time to create a journey for the customer, but before that, we need to know what is his/her day in the life. How is the typical day of our customer look like? Then start mapping.

Start with the steps required. Based on the persona that you have created.

Broadly speaking we are doing 4 steps to build an amazing Customer Journey.

Explore — As an organization through customer insights and data also UX interviews, we can figure out the needs of our customers. Here for an airline app, based on previous journeys made, App can suggest the best deal in the market to buy the tickets.

Decide — As stated before giving the power to the customer to decide what they want to do with self-serve capability to select their preferred seats, meals, movie experience.

Engage — Throughout the journey engage them to buy helping them at steps that they need. For example, once the app knows that the customer is at the airport help them direct the baggage drop area and to the boarding gates. All airports are getting colossal and it’s hard to find the shortest routes.

Retain — Last but the most important step is to retain customers. So give them the loyalty points, remember them and then if required engage them again.