How Siloed Service Delivery is Ruining Customer Experience (CX)

Although the data derived regarding individual touchpoints is very valuable, the issue regarding the narrow focus on them leads to broken service-delivery chains. Companies can use the following four steps to fix these delivery chains and enhance CX in the process: 

• Identify Key Customer Journeys
• Understand their Performance in Each Key Journey 
• Redesign the Customer Experience
• Initiate Change and a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Identify Key Customer Journeys

By clearly and effectively defining customer journeys using judgement-driven and data-driven analysis, companies can identify the most significant journeys and the pain points that are within them. 

Organizations that are simply aiming to fix a few problems within certain customer journeys can benefit from simply employing a top-down problem-solving approach. However, organizations that want to transform the overall customer experience will need to create comprehensive customer journey maps for each unique journey. This map must outline the ways in which optimizing the journey will benefit the organization so that feasible strategies and initiatives can be devised. This takes more of a bottom-up problem-solving approach that begins with additional research into customers’ journeys to understand which ones have the most significant impact on customers and on their perception of business performance. 

Understand their Performance in Each Key Journey 

Once an organization has carried out all the research required to have a thorough understanding of its key customer journeys, it must take the next step and examine each journey to understand how it influences the organization’s current performance. This will require additional research for which the organization can use data sources such as employee and customer focus groups. This, in amalgamation with the conducted bottom-up analysis, will allow you to map out the most significant variations of the different customer journeys and hence the steps a customer is likely to take from the start to the end of their journey. This research will provide you with valuable insights on the touchpoints that prevent conversion and its causes, highlighting processes that unintentionally influence adverse effects. 

Redesign the Customer Experience

The next step is to redesign the customer journey by initiating solutions that engage the company’s front-line workers. The cause of poor customer experience always roots from the inside and is often a result of cross-functional disconnects. It is therefore key to ensure that cross-functional teams begin working together to identify problems and come up with solutions that are feasible for all departments and can help improve CX effectively. 

Initiate Change and a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Once all the research has been done and the problems and solutions have been identified, then comes the most crucial step: the initiation of change. This is the most challenging step as you must figure out how this change can be implemented to scale and how these initiatives can be sustained for the long run to ensure an improved customer experience. There are two significant changes that are often required when initiating significant change at scale in customer journeys: 

• Alter organizational processes to enhance customer journeys
• Select new metrics and incentives or adjust the usage of current metrics and incentives to support the entire customer journey rather than just individual touchpoints