Avoiding pitfalls in the customer journey: Allocating brand resources

March 15, 2022 By BEAM

If you have aligned your company around the importance of brand, the next challenge you face will be the allocation of resources to brand.

Often resources are concentrated on the consumer experience (CX). This CX focus undercuts the delivery of a better overall experience. Strictly making decisions through the CX lens overlooks the role that employees and partners play in the delivery of better experience.

Discovering interrelationships

In a recent study, CSG identified the importance of understanding the customer journey. Having analyzed the journey across multiple industries, they identified the link between customer, employees, and partners. Some of the key findings they noted are tied to the volume increases:

• 80% of journey interactions took place in just three channels: Email, Phone, Social.
• Email volume in customer interactions rose from 4.4B in 2020 to 6.4B in 2021
• Average call time dropped from 1:43 minutes to just 35 seconds in 2021.
• YOY social notification volume increased a whopping 950% in 2021.

Volume itself does not imply connections between customers, employees, and partners. What draws them together is the solutions architecture required to address these changes – changes that will make for a better customer experience.

Solving problems

Imagine you are trying to file a claim with your insurance company. After several attempts to upload your PDF document to get a refund, the system will not accept or acknowledge your claim. As the insured, you are helpless to get to a resolution. You may inform your company, but they will direct you to a representative of the insurance company. Your frustration level rises. The insurance rep may call you or email you. He sends you to tech support. Frustration rises again. You get to tech support, and they cannot resolve your issue. Maybe the system is down, backlogged, or just not working. Frustration rises further. Now you are back to the rep, who opens a special case and you’re back on the phone again. You may lose it; you may not. An issue here is that the last employee you speak with inherits the result of the customer’s experience, good or bad.

The solution required here requires a connection between the employee, the underlying data with the customer’s experience, and the technology to find good resolutions. Virtually no company can solve the technical challenges by itself. It will need partners to link the pieces together, so the employee ultimately becomes a strong ambassador for the brand. Partners enable employees and employees enable the customer experience.

Gathering resources

Determining where your brand can thrive is the first step in our digital consulting process. Evaluating your brand, analyzing your user’s journey, and auditing your current digital efforts are some of the ways to establish the best brand building blocks for growth. However, you cannot overcome fragmented journeys in a day. We hear that Rome was not built in a day either– it took a few months, for sure.

Brand managers will do well to consider a framework to explain the roadmap for customer journey repair. The framework will not only prioritize work for now but build expectations for what comes next. It has timeframes, but not deadlines. It has prioritization, but not absolute amounts. The table below represents the framework design:

Aligning all parties and issues into one working concept allows the solution to be described overtime and across all stakeholders who participate in the solution.

Case study

Let’s take the insurance claim problem described above and apply our framework. We can assume that the number of incidents with this logging problem is large enough to affect the renewal rate of a set of customers whose lifetime value is high. For each bottleneck, the brand team could prescribe a solution and result for each link in the process. The brand team could specify the solutions to create moments that improved brand strength. The solution roadmap would look like the table below:

Resources would flow to the solution step by step-building moments that improve the employee ability first and enabling a better customer experience later. Thus, defining an end state that has both an objective and key result.

Resource allocations start with a diagnostic of journeys and ends with a roadmap of the solution that address all the parties involved in crafting better brand moments.

If you would like to learn more about investing in your brand, please reach out to us!