When a customer buys your product they have only completed the first leg of a long journey that includes all interactions with you before and after the purchase. Most digital businesses believe that when they focus on customer experience, they should address individual touchpoints, yet this siloed approach to customer interactions leads to a lack of understanding about what is most important: the customer’s end-to-end experience.

In many scenarios, even when initial customer satisfaction metrics are good, a significant number of customers eventually leave due to an overall subpar experience. Often, the core causes of churn could have been avoided if the functional groups that cloud businesses rely on to develop and deliver their products had collaborated better and weren’t working in an environment with siloed CX processes.

While individual touchpoints in the service delivery journey can appear healthy, the end result can be quite the opposite: the bad experiences add up and cause a negative overall experience for the customers.

Independent software vendors that give customers the best experience possible across their entire journey should expect to see increases in customer satisfaction, sales, customer retention, cost savings across the board, and even employee satisfaction. According to McKinsey’s research, the difference in customer satisfaction between the top- and bottom-quartile companies that focused on journey performance was 50% greater than the difference between the top- and bottom-quartile companies that focused only on touchpoint performance.

Address journey performance

Implement this best practice in form of an excellent customer end-to-end journey by taking 5 critical steps:

• Identify the customer perspective, review the current state of different customer journeys with your product and think about how they respond and react
• Map out how customers move through different touchpoints & episodes in each journey
• During each stage of the journey, brainstorm with different functional leaders the knowledge needs, user expectations and preferred channels of engagement of the customer and the users
• Establish the most crucial areas of improvement that you have to resolve in the short-term, and plan implementation activities around that
• Assign KPIs and metrics at each stage so there is granular control over how customers progress in their journey

To succeed, AWS partners must develop a customer journey scorecard that includes information about the episodes, targeted content, channels, duration of episodes, and their repetition in the end-to-end journey. Stronger collaboration among many business functions, and frequently external partners, is critical to implementing an integrated approach to customer experience. Your delivery teams must work in tandem with your product team, who in turn must communicate with marketing and sales, who in turn must coordinate with customer success. And the cycle continues.

ISVs going through VeUP’s Active Upgrade program and using our advisory services can rely on VeUP to provoke discussion of and execute on a customized end-to-end customer journey. VeUp work closely with cross-functional teams at our clients, ensuring the customer experience processes are based on collaboration as well as best practices.

– Vincen Arivannoor, Senior Consultant