Mapping the Customer Journey From Effort to Emotion
When planning and developing an organization’s customer experience design, effective engagement is the most valuable tool that can steer the customer journey from effort to positive emotion. To take a customer from feeling the need to interact with your company to feeling positive about the interaction, enterprises must examine the customer experience from the customer’s perspective, not from that of the enterprise and its countless siloed departments. However, most organizations’ customer experience efforts have traditionally been centered on internal departments, not around the customer’s intuitive needs. In the digital age, it’s time for customer engagement to go from being an internal hygiene requirement to a valuable point of differentiation for an organization.
For example, a global lighting and wellness enterprise recently made this transition effectively when it brought together its sales, service, and marketing functions to think from the perspective of the customer rather than the departments concerned. The organization adopted a process of selling that didn’t begin with a sales pitch but instead with customer engagement, harking back to a simpler time when someone at a company had a personal connection with an individual customer and their needs. But to do this on a scale of hundreds of millions of customers requires an enterprise to reimagine engagement through the eyes of its customers.
For example, when a service executive demonstrates an understanding of a customer’s current problem with a product or service and can effectively communicate empathy in the engagement, he earns the right to recommend a product or service upgrade that can result in a sale. If a significant number of customers call the service team with inquiries on how to use a particular product or service, this information can be collected, measured and delivered to the marketing team, enabling that department to design a campaign that educates customers on better usage techniques. In both examples, engagement serves the needs of the customer first, and not that of the enterprise and its individually functioning departments.
Mobility and the cloud are two emerging technologies that are enabling engagements to be more synchronous and elastic throughout an organization. Most enterprise applications are either already mobile or have mobile access, but enterprises are grappling with the question of which mobile apps will drive successful customer engagement processes. It is becoming clear that mobile-led strategies will be at the heart of implementing applications that support these processes. Embracing mobility and the cloud enables an opportunity for enterprises to move away from a focus on traditional departmental functions and instead direct their focus toward the customer experience.
The traditional sales function, for example, has followed the tried-and-tested cycle of lead generation, lead capture, pipeline management, sales funnel management, lead conversion, and order capture. But can this cycle continue to hold relevance in the age of the hyper-connected digital customer? The more enterprises cater to these functions without catering to the engagement with the customer, the further away they are drifting from ensuring a positive customer experience. Being true to the engagement with the customer is how the future of customer experience will evolve.
But what makes up an effective tool kit to help enable this transition? The answer lies in reexamining the way silos operate in an enterprise, breaking them down to meet the needs of a customer’s engagement with the organization, and implementing technologies that act as the glue that binds together multiple departments, with the customer always at the center of the engagement. That is when engagement will become the differentiator for the enterprise, and not just another responsibility that needs to be done.
Ravi Purohit is vice president and global head, Oracle Service Line, of Wipro Ltd. Purohit is responsible for driving growth and P&L for Oracle solutions within Wipro and drives Wipro’s partnership with Oracle. He brings more than 22 years of strong expertise and experience in IT service delivery, domain, technology, and industry, of which the past 20 have been with Wipro.