Align with Your Customers

Market segmentation is the process that looks at opportunities from a business perspective. It allows a business to select the customers that it wants to pamper by providing an exceptional customer experience. It is not much different from finding compatibility matches on the largest online dating website, Match.com. In order to really make a connection—in our case, close a sale—you still need to dance around the potential match. You will perform much better if you know the steps of their favorite dance.

In the business world, the customer experience cycle is the dance and touch points are the steps. By understanding and mapping the customer journey for a targeted market, a business can align itself closely with its customers. This mapping allows a business to identify levers that it could pull to further enhance the customer experience at each touch point, hence allowing a business to develop yet another set of differentiation: [customer] experience-based differentiation (EBD). Darn these marketing guys! They always come up with new catchphrases, don’t they?

Catchphrase aside, there is no doubt about the fact that providing an exceptional customer experience will build brand loyalty and repeat business. There are two ways to go about mapping the customer experience: 1) Start with your existing selling process and document all touch points, hence creating a customer relationship cycle, or 2) Start fresh with a customer profile and try to guess what possible routes she will follow to buy your products and create touch points. No matter what approach you take, note that there is a fundamental structure to the customer experience as shown in Figure 6.2. It is:

Figure 6.2: Atomic Structure of the Customer Experience

1. Customer journey
   A customer journey is the sum of all the experiences that a customer gains as she goes through her buying cycle. It includes experiences due to interaction with your business—above-the-surface experiences—as well as experiences due to a customer's environment and circumstances beyond your control—below-the-surface experiences.

   For example, Tim, who forgot to buy a gift on his anniversary, may rush to a flower shop to pick up a bouquet of roses for his wife. The flower shop may be providing a pleasant experience by offering a wide variety of flowers at a reasonable cost. Tim is making a journey towards a lovely evening and a quality life.

   It is important to realize that a vendor’s touch point is just one part of the overall customer journey. Figure 6.2 shows the customer journey as a series of decision steps. The red steps are a customer’s own responsibility, or below-the-surface steps, where a vendor does not have direct influence. These points offer a real opportunity to outsmart and leapfrog your competitors. The green steps, on the other hand, are where a customer interacts with a vendor and the vendor can directly influence these steps.

2. Touch points or customer relation lifecycle
   Each decision step where a customer comes into direct contact with a business is termed a touch point e.g., an advertisement, a website, sales rep, receptionist, customer service representative, etc. The collection of these touch points results in the environment that a company creates to let its customers do business with them. It is termed a customer relationship cycle. Figure 6.3 shows eight stages—each stage could have multiple decision steps—of the customer relation lifecycle, both from a business and customer perspective. Titles in black represent the business perspective and titles in the white represents customers’ intents. Customer relationship lifecycle provide businesses an opportunity to understand what their customers value at each stage and what are the drivers to fulfill their unmet needs, hence moving them from one stage to another.

   

   Figure 6.3: Customer Relationship Lifecycle: A Customer and Business View

3. Moment of truth
   In his book The Moment of Truth, former Scandinavian Airlines CEO Jan Carlzon stated: “Anytime a customer comes into contact with any aspect of a business, however remote, is an opportunity to form an impression.” This impression is the moment of truth. These are little moments that have unusually high emotional significance. They are what a customer will remember longest after the journey is over. Identifying these moments is the key strategic step in aligning your business with customers' needs and expectations.

This atomic view of the customer experience allows you to align your business with your customers, which lets you shorten the sales cycle, stop the leak in your sales pipeline, and hold your prices in today’s cut-throat business environment. This alignment is achieved by mapping the customer experience and providing exceptional, memorable experiences at every moment of truth.

To illustrate the point, let’s look at the example of customer experience mapping.

Related:

• Table of Content
• Red Queen Effect – An Introduction
  
• The Billionaire Code
  • Secret of World Class Companies
    
  • Impact of Using Secrets of World Class Companies
    
• Cracking the Code
  
  • Customer Experience
    
  • Customer Engagement Channels
    
  • From Multiple Channels to Integrated Multichannel Selling
    
  • Benefits of Integrated Multichannel Selling Models
    
  • Customer Relationship Lifecycle
  • Integrated Multichannel Selling Models
    
    • Reduced Costs
      
    • Improved margins
      
    • Broader market coverage
    • Rapid revenue growth
      
  • In Conclusion
    
• Implementation Plan
  • Renovation or Innovation?
    
  • Implementation Process
  • Baseline current go-to-market activities
    
  • Protect & Renew
    
    • You've Got Customers. Now What?
      
    • Net Promoter Score
      
    • Customer Profitability – A look from inside
      
    • Finding Treasures
      
    • Customer Life Time Value
      
    • Calculating Customer Life Time Value
      
    • Unearthing the Treasure
      
    • In Conclusion
      
  • Plan for New Sales
    
    • Targeting the Right Market
      
    • Market Segmentation
      
    • Prioritizing Target Markets

Reference

• Tim Ogilive – Peer Insight Consulting