Customer Experience and the Customer Journey Matrix

Marketing experts suggest that products should add a satisfying experience and services should add tangible products to get customers returned to them. Recent marketers say that creating a compelling customer experience is the real challenge to a company and the success of a product/service depends on how well it can develop an effortless and comfortable journey for the customers. Technology has made the customer journey smooth through AI-based apps for both service and product-based companies. Numerous tech-enabled business models make our lives easy and comfortable which we could not have imagined a few years back. Whether to attend a lecture delivered from San Francisco and gain a degree from a foreign university or to get your favourite dish at your doorstep at midnight, all become possible through technology. An airline, a service provider adds a small kit of toiletries and hot yummy food associated with personalized services to make progress towards the goal of returning the customers frequently. Whereas, Apple, the product company adds the benefit of monitoring health indicators and rewards its customers with a memorable and immersing customer experience while selling a tangible product like Smartwatch.

Customer Experience vs Customer Service

Marketers and businesses interchangeably use customer experience and customer service very often. Customer service is a small subset that leads to superior Customer experience. Consider the case when a passenger wanted to reschedule his Flexi airline ticket because of a health issue and had a conversation with the Customer Service Executive. He might be overwhelmed by the conversation and the options offered to him, an example of good customer service. But he would be amazed when the Airline offered a plan of the journey at a discounted rate as the rescheduling was due to his illness and would have a great customer experience. When an automobile company appoints one specific Customer Service Executive to deal with all your queries and car service needs, it builds a long-term relationship and is an example of great customer service. In the same case, the added service of pick up and drop off after every car service delight the customer and offer a special customer journey. With the advent of technology now it has become easier for a company to connect with its customers in multiple ways and the Customer Experience or CX has evolved. CX is a part of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and research has manifested several benefits of a better customer experience for a company-

• Customers become more loyal when they have an enriching customer experience.
• Customers are ready to pay premium prices to have a better experience.
• Impulse purchases from the same company are more common after any customer received a personalized great customer experience earlier.
• Poor customer experience results in switching to another brand.
• A brand, able to generate superior customer experience outperforms its competitors.

Rising Customer expectations and Evolution of Customer Experience
There is a paradox between what customers expect and what companies deliver. Research says that around 80% of the companies claim that they deliver superior customer experience contrary to the customers’ claim that only 8% of them receive great customer experience. A customer expects that at every touch point or every interaction with the company/brand, there should be an excellent customer experience. Technological breakthroughs and social media have empowered customers more than ever before and made any brand more vulnerable due to the availability of online reviews and feedback in the public domain. Post-pandemic, Customer expectations have risen due to changing consumer behaviour, online shopping and more reliance on digital technology. On the other hand, companies become more proactive to create a better customer experience as they can capture customers’ purchase history, access the data on consumer’s demographic and psychographics and predict future buying behaviour more accurately. To serve the customers effectively, many companies have adopted a holistic view of the entire customer journey and collect feedback at multiple touch points of that journey. Still, product managers are struggling to get the best strategy to generate excellent customer experience and facilitate the best customer journey.

The Customer Journey Matrix

In a recent HBR article ( July August 2022), authors Ahir Gopaldas and Anton Siebert argued that making an effortless and predictable journey does not guarantee a better customer experience and may backfire on the company. Depending on the circumstances, a customer may not prefer a very smooth effortless journey as expected generally. For example, while pursuing an academic course, a customer is ready for considerable mental and physical exertion and making the course over-simplified may reduce customers’ excitement and increase dissatisfaction. Another example could be a Yoga/ KickBoxing class with the too-easy goal set by the company that made the customer journey boring. The customer journey matrix suggested by the marketing expert is as follows

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In the “Routine” customer journey, customers put less effort and the result is predictable, for example buying any utility products in an online store. Here the marketer should aim to make the journey more effortless by accurately predicting the product types, size etc and delighting the customer with a streamlined and smooth customer experience. “Joyride” is a pleasure trip for a customer that needs minimum effort from him but it is an unpredictable customer journey. Typically associated with the purchase of variety-seeking products. A local beauty salon can create frequent moments of delight for its existing customers by offering varieties of beauty packages.

Or a fashion superstore may change its interior assortment by updating fashion items frequently. Treks are predictable journeys but the customers are ready to put effort to achieve challenging goals. A weight loss program offered by a company is a good example of “Trek”, where marketers should break the long-term journey into small achievable targets and encourage customers to achieve the desired goal by gamification or reward. “Odyssey’’, the most uncommon customer journey, requires great effort from customers and the journey is thrilling and adventurous for the customer. Odysseys are common for Products/services that customers adopt with passion and enthusiasm. An organisation preparing for a beauty pageant or a cricket coaching centre offers the “Odyssey’’, the journey itself is the destination. Here the result depends on the effort as well as on the potential of the customer and the product/service manager should leave no stone unturned to make the journey memorable.

Customer journey acts as a good differentiator and companies should continuously innovate to facilitate exciting customer journeys. There is no fixed design to create the best customer journey but the above Customer journey matrix may be considered as a guiding model to make it most compelling and valuable to the customer.

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