The customer experience must be optimized as a whole. Indeed, we are used to designing and optimizing individual portions of a customer experience, whether it is a website, app, or retail store. However, we now need to change the way we see the customer journey and start thinking a lot more about the connections between these different individual experiences. These are the aspects that determine whether a customer experience is successful!
Fragmentation… the main customer experience problem
It is possible that each of your communication and distribution channels works perfectly, and provides good results... Or, it is also possible that your overall customer experience is not terrible although each of your channels provides an optimized interaction to consumers. This is the problem of fragmentation. In other words, many marketers still focus on the parts of the whole rather than the whole itself.
The overall experience is made up of an amalgam of individual elements and is defined by how these elements fit together and interact together. A lack of cohesion between channels can have a very negative impact on how customers perceive the whole. If you want to satisfy them, each of your channels must “work in harmony”.
We always tend to compartmentalize our tasks within a company. Why that ? Well, because most people are specialists in one or two aspects of customer experience: they can be web developers, customer service managers, etc. The idea is then to set up multidisciplinary teams that exist horizontally within the organization. The objective is to tackle entire courses transversally.
Thus, the general idea is to focus on the links between the different possible interactions with customers. Goals and KPIs should also be tied to this new vision rather than being limited to individual customer experience subdivisions. It's important to be able to measure which elements work and which don't, but also to understand people's emotional reactions to the experience as a whole.
How to achieve consistency and a better customer experience?
It's no longer a secret that the customer must be the center of the universe for brands. In this sense, the goal is to provide an exceptional customer experience to satisfy the customer. To do this, brands must take into account the overall customer journey and each of the assets they use in order to optimize it. It's far from easy because each client is different, as are their needs and rate of progress along the way.
Additionally, consumers today are exposed to many touchpoints throughout their journey, be it emails, videos, social media posts, and more. The difficulty lies in proposing the right message at the right moment of the course for each individual. This task represents the whole issue of the consistency of the customer experience on the different channels.
Within your company, for example, you can determine a certain number of "typical" journeys, which will allow you to better understand the customer experience as a whole. Also remember to brief your team on this new overall vision that they must adopt!
