In the last article, we saw how important it is to thoroughly observe customers, their habits, their needs and the obstacles they face. Now we will see how important it is to focus on addressing needs of your customers, not just improving processes that affect the current customer journey. An article on the mckinsey.com website addresses these issues.
Designing a compelling customer journey
First, you must enlist everyone who can shape the experience your customers have on their journey. In particular, operational and IT employees must be involved. It is not enough just to map out customer touchpoints. You need to implement changes so that what happens in the background will enable your company to deliver an outstanding customer journey.
For example, in 2013 Disney started distributing colored wristbands to visitors of its theme parks. They were called MagicBands and they enabled customers to pay for meals and gifts, to go on rides and unlock their hotel rooms. The technology connected to those wristbands made it possible to plan what you want to see and not be annoyed by waiting in lines.
Don’t be satisfied with improving the current customer journey
You need to move from addressing issues to fundamentally rethinking the customer experience. Incremental cost reductions and quality improvements are great, but too narrow an approach will blind you and you will miss better overall solutions.
Amazon managed to find such a new, overall solution. The company used the fact that people are most inclined to reorder when they’re using an item and see that they are going to run out. They developed Amazon Dash, a small wi-fi-connected device decorated with common items such are plastic wrap and coffee. You put these order buttons around your home and can reorder an item simply by pressing them.
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