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SUSTAINABLE SERVICE
BUILDING SUCCESSFUL CUSTOMER JOURNEYS
Executive Summary
When it comes to sales and service delivery, most companies have a tendency to
focus on discrete elements and ignore the relationship of those elements to the larger
experience their customers are having when they go in search of a solution. This
myopic approach is focused on the micro view of a single interaction rather than the
macro view of the problem/resolution and lifetime journey, resulting in high levels of
effort and expense for everyone involved and missing broader opportunities along
the way.
Consider the following examples. Are consumers:
• Shopping for a mortgage—or—buying a home?
• Comparing airfares—or—taking a trip?
• Making a doctor’s appointment —or—managing a chronic illness?
In most cases, customers are in fact on a million different journeys – a collection of
complex and compound events undertaken to resolve a perceived need. If you
understand how the customer’s needs align to what you offer, you can proactively
lead (nudge) customers in a compelling, dynamic, personalized direction. Ultimately
every company needs to clearly answer one question: What Customer Experience
(CX) do you want to deliver?
The Service Process
At the most basic level, every sales and service organization considers three things
each time they interact with a customer.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Executive Summary.................. 1
The Service Process.................. 1
Streamlining the Journey ......... 6
Use Case Scenario: Buying a
Home........................................ 7
Journey Map..................... 10
Stakeholder Map .............. 10
Analytics and Customer
Effort................................. 13
Conclusion.............................. 14
Solution Components............. 14
About Genesys ....................... 15
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1. What did they/we want? Most interactions are
initiated by the customer, looking for a solution to their
problem. Any real action first depends on identifying the
customer and their specific need. Because there are at
least two parties to every transaction, it’s important to
acknowledge that the company providing goods and
services has an interest as well. How well are these mutual
interests aligned?
2. What did we do? Once the customer and their need
have been identified, the company formulates a response.
Accurate and relevant responses drive a continued,
mutually beneficial relationship. How do you compile the
right response?
3. What was the result? After all is said and done, the
most important thing to assess is whether the objectives
of the customer and the company have been met. Was the
outcome delivered in the most effective and efficient way
possible?
Once these have been established, things start to get interesting. Leading companies
got that way by using customer interactions as part of their research and
development efforts. One way they do this is by examining the outcome of each
interaction to determine:
1. Was it desirable? Did both parties get something meaningful from the
interaction? Will it cause them to have a positive memory and share that with
others?
2. What causes desirable results? When we unpack the traits of top performers,
we often find that they do certain things in a predicable way. Top salespeople
are able to identify prospects that have a high likelihood of converting, and
quickly move on when they sense there is no upside potential. Some service
agents get consistently high customer satisfaction scores. In both cases, the
behaviors can be identified if desired.
3. Can we anticipate, nudge and make outcomes repeatable? Ultimately the
ideal sales and service process all comes down to helping everyone involved
make better choices. This requires an ability to quickly put a value on one
choice over another based on information available, which in turn helps us
understand what information is necessary to make good choices. In a digital
age of empowered consumers with unlimited access to information, speed
matters. Helping customers make informed decisions, creating awareness of
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a need the customer hasn’t yet even defined, and pointing customers in the
best direction is at the core of sustainable service delivery.
These individual steps can be turned into a repeatable process for every single
interaction customers have with the company, making it easy to drill down and ask
much deeper questions. It’s not just enough to know what the customer wanted, we
need to understand how they ended up in this specific interaction channel. What was
there about how they identified their need that made them think this was the right
place to solve the problem? Was this the first channel of choice, or did they start out
somewhere else, meet a new challenge or fail altogether, and then end up here? Path
analytics can be leveraged to improve individual channels so that they help the
customer resolve their need at the first point of contact. In many situations that first
point will be self-service, which is also the lowest cost place to meet their needs.
FIGURE 1: SERVICE PROCESS
Next we can unpack the ‘What did we do?’ question to understand the real intent of
sales and service delivery by asking ‘What should we do?’ This is what fuels Next Best
Offer (NBO) or Next Best Action (NBA), the holy grail of any company—particularly
when the action is highly tailored to meet the needs of both parties.
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Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) own the relationship between brand, marketing, and
customer experience. The offer management process (NBO) relies on three basic
elements to identify targets and match opportunities at the right moment. Each are
treated as distinct disciplines that are fluid in nature.
1. Offer Inventory is developed and catalogued by the marketing department.
Among other things, it can be designed to focus on new products and
services, introduce a sense of urgency, highlight competitive differentiation,
and ultimately increase wallet share.
2. Personalized Customer Segmentation is the practice of dividing a customer
base into groups of individuals that are similar in specific ways relevant to
marketing, such as age, gender, interests and spending habits. It can be a
powerful means to identify unmet customer needs. Companies that identify
underserved segments can then outperform the competition by developing
uniquely appealing products and services. Customer Segmentation is most
effective when a company tailors offerings to segments that are the most
profitable and serves them with distinct competitive advantages. The best
models are based on value because they determine the profit potential of
each segment by analyzing the revenue and cost impacts of serving each
segment, and then target segments according to their profit potential and the
company's ability to serve them in a proprietary way.
3. Customer Life-Cycle at the most basic levels can be deconstructed into four
distinct phases: the Awareness phase when the customer first realizes they
have a need or problem; the Selection phase when they identify potential
solutions, compare and evaluate features and benefits, and eventually decide
on the solution that will most closely meet their needs; the Use phase when
the selection made is employed for its intended purpose; and ultimately a
decision by the customer to either Grow with the provider by consuming
more offerings, or to Leave in search of better solutions elsewhere.
FIGURE 2: CUSTOMER LIFE-CYCLE
Awareness Selection Use
Grow
Leave
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Next Best Offer aims to assist customers in the Selection and Grow phases by making
them aware of offerings, and benefits that can be derived from building a relationship
over time—Customer Lifetime Value. For a financial services company, this typically
begins when a Direct Deposit (savings/checking) account is opened. From there, most
customers will add a credit card and set up bill pay services. There could be an
opportunity to create a vehicle for investing and retirement account management. In
time, some customers will also need a mortgage when they buy a home, and establish
custodial accounts for the children. This lifetime journey may span twenty years, but
it’s clear how the collective share of wallet increases over that period.
FIGURE 3: CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE
This is where the ability to assign a value becomes pivotal because it helps the
company determine if, when and how to engage with customers. For example, if a
customer visits a banking website and authenticates, it reveals the customer’s core
banking information such as accounts held, balances and payment history. If the
customer browses for loan rates or a new credit card, the bank can leverage the
known information to decide whether they want to extend an offer for products to
the customer—or not, as the case may be.
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FIGURE 4: ENHANCED SERVICE PROCESS
If the outcome was not desirable, what steps can be taken to recover? If we have a
solid understanding of what the customer wanted and why we were not able to meet
that need, it’s much easier to formulate a response. Getting the facts straight is critical
for addressing the failure from a position of confidence.
And finally, as we develop a deeper understanding of what it is that causes desirable
results we discover the elements of sales and service that are truly responsible for
driving a given outcome. That in turn can be mined to create a repeatable process
that is focused on efficiency, simultaneously eliminating the multitude of things that
simply waste time. That profile is then the yardstick by which the sales and service
delivery team is measured to gain real insight into how employees are spending their
time.
Streamlining the Journey
Understanding customer journeys is a prerequisite to managing those journeys. There
are many ways this can be done: directly through surveys, or inferred through
interaction analytics and leveraging big data. Regardless of the method, core
elements for consideration involve:
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• What the customer wants. It’s critical to stay focused on the brand promise
of core offerings when addressing this issue. The BMW brand is all about “The
Ultimate Driving Machine,” not low prices. If the customer wants low prices,
they’re looking in the wrong place.
• How the customer feels. Daniel Kahneman has written extensively about
research in this area that looks at peak points of pleasure and pain that
people experience on life’s journeys, and the relationship of these points to
how each journey ends. Even journeys that have significant pain points can
endow the person with a better memory if things end well.
When these concepts are fairly well understood, opportunities to streamline and
build successful journeys begin to arise. A set of principles collectively known as
design thinking is the best tool we have for creating meaningful interactions and
developing a responsive, flexible organizational culture.
David Edelman and Marc Singer of McKinsey outline the new customer journey and
four distinct but interconnected capabilities companies must have to respond to
disruption and deliver both a consistent and personalized customer experience:
automation, to smoothly carry customers through each step of their online path;
personalization, to create a customized experience for each individual; contextual
Interaction, to engage customers and appropriately sequence the steps they take;
and journey innovation, to add improvements that enhance and extend the journey
and foster customer loyalty.
The service design goals should be clear:
• Point customers to the best path for prescriptive resolution: based on your
need, we recommend you do the following. Based on what we know about
others who have had a similar need in the past, this is the best channel and
path to success.
• Decide dynamically if you want to engage, and how best to do it.
• Identify discrete actions that produce optimal, repeatable results.
How exactly do we make all of this work – individually and collectively? Let’s take a
look at some use case examples to find out.
Use Case Scenario: Buying a Home
When someone decides to buy a home, they embark on a long—and often painful—
journey. First, getting pre-qualified for a loan and enlisting the services of a real estate
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agent to help find the right home. During the initial stages, the agent will determine
how much home the buyer can afford, and narrow the search of available properties
accordingly. Once the ideal home is found, a contract is negotiated. On completion, a
series of tasks are spawned to obtain a loan, secure a clear title, perform inspections
and repairs, and satisfy insurance requirements.
On their own, each of these are handled by different companies with their own set of
requirements and procedures that exist in a vacuum, with little awareness of other
parts simultaneously Taken together, all of these help move the customer from
‘prospect’ to ‘homeowner.’
The most important element of buying a home is the mortgage. There are many ways
customers can do this, but many will ask the realtor for recommendations on loan
brokers, shop online for mortgage offerings between well-known banks, or visit their
existing bank. Regardless of the option taken, both the prospective lender and the
prospective buyer have an interest in a successful outcome. The prospective buyer
wants a favorable mortgage rate; the prospective lender wants loans that are likely
to be repaid. Using service design guidelines, what sort of a journey can we imagine
that meets the needs of both parties to the deal? Let’s examine the five-step
mortgage portion of the home buying process using service design goals of
automation, personalization, contextual interaction and journey innovation so that
we can see how to point customers in the right direction, decide if there is a reason
to engage, and identify discrete actions that produce optimal, repeatable results.
FIGURE 5: MORTGAGE PROCESS
Get Mortgage
Pre-Approved
Search for
Homes
Write Offers &
Negotiate
Preliminary
Loan
Processing
Preliminary
Underwriting
Final
Processing
Final
Underwriting
Closing,
Funding,
Recording
Possession
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1. Prequalification: During the initial consultation, the loan officer reviews
various loan products with the prospective buyer to determine which will be
most appropriate.
2. Application: The buyer completes and submits a loan application that
specifies the property address, the borrower’s employment history, current
debts and current assets. This loan officer uses this information to obtain a
report on the borrower’s financial status with a credit reporting agency.
3. Processing: Disclosure notices are issued, and the borrower’s employment,
income and assets are verified. Loan processing specialists work with
underwriters to perform a property title search, obtain appraisal, inspection
and proof of insurance.
4. Underwriting: The underwriter may develop loan stipulations that need
further clarification or proof in order to clear the loan to close.
5. Closing: The loan is approved and closing attorney or escrow agents are
advised. At closing, all final documents are signed, witnessed and/or
notarized. The loan is funded and recorded with the relevant government
office.
For this example, we will use:
Persona:
• Brian is a 35-year old architect, married with no children.
Stakeholders:
• Kathi is the realtor helping Brian find a home and mortgage
• Joanne is selling her home to Brian
• Jacob is the loan officer
• Karen is the loan processor
• Sara is the loan underwriter
• Stephen is the escrow agent
The Chief Customer Officer or Journey Prediction Manager would create a map of
these stages using service design principles that will help illustrate the journey and
calculate journey return-on-investment, provide a storyboard and description of
events, and show the interaction channels, customer emotions and level of
engagement. Much like the research of Kahneman, mapping the emotional journey
makes it easy to understand how the customer feels at any given moment. More
importantly, it helps align the customer emotion to the brand promise and identify
areas where budgets should be allocated for improvement.
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Journey Map
FIGURE 6: CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP
Stakeholder Map
In addition, we can create a stakeholder map depicting the relationship of all key
players in this transactions. In this example Brian is shown in the center of the map in
the innermost circle. In the next ring we find four key players to this transaction: the
seller, the realtor, the escrow agent and the loan officer.
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FIGURE 7: CUSTOMER STAKEHOLDER MAP
In the outer circle we find supporting players for the loan origination process,
including the loan processer and the loan underwriter.
Collectively, these tools show a given process and participants end-to-end.
Our objective is to apply automation, personalization, contextual interaction and
journey innovation to this process. Let’s take a closer look at each.
• Automation streamlines journey steps. If we start from a premise that the
shortest path from an inquiry to a funded mortgage involves electronic
document submission and storage, and utilize digital signatures where
required, we eliminate the need for all forms of paper documentation. This
saves time, postage, and storage costs and makes retrieval and sharing easy.
It also allows us to apply business rules to the process around filtering, sorting
and prioritizing work. For example, an electronic loan application could only
be submitted when required fields were complete. Addresses supplied could
be checked against postal databases to validate accuracy prior to submission.
Employment history would need rational dates. The math would need to
work for loan amount requested, salary and other sources of income, and
debts. The application would remain in the applicants control until these
were completed. The same automation process provides a chain of custody
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on the application so that it makes it easy to know exactly where one might
be at any moment—much like ordering a pizza online and knowing when it
went into the oven and was out for delivery.
• Personalization uses information about a customer—either based on past
interactions or collected from external sources—to instantaneously
customize the experience. Initially this would include basic profile elements
like preferred language and communication channels. Once this information
is known, the customer no longer needs to provide it in order to obtain
service or updates.
• Contextual Interaction uses knowledge about where a customer is in a
journey to deliver them to the next set of interactions. No sense in asking the
customer to repeat or go back, and instead keep things moving forward at
each step of the way. If the customer begins something in one channel and
subsequently spawns a new interaction in the same or different channel, the
first prompt should be to ask if the customer wants to resume where they left
off. This includes proactively reaching out to the customer with status
updates and reminders when due dates are coming up.
• Journey innovation extends the interaction to new sources of value, such as
new services, for both the customer and the brand. Analytics can prove
invaluable here to identify new opportunities and needs. Surveys can validate
historical outcomes as a way of providing permission to renew or offer
related products and services, and capture service failures so that they can
be resolved in a timely manner.
This approach is more holistic, and helps to understand both sides of the equation:
what the customer wants, and what the company wants. Designing a triage process
that asks the right questions up front creates a low barrier to entry for the customer
and makes access easy; at the same time, it positions the company early on to make
an informed decision about whether they want to engage. For example, assume that
our borrower, Brian, started this journey online by checking mortgage rates. He’s
asked to provide information to a few basic questions: name and contact, down
payment and desired loan amount (to determine loan to value (LTV) amount),
employment status and postal code of the home covered by the loan. With just a few
questions the bank can immediately decide to engage; selectively asking the
borrower a few extra questions could even help qualify them for a more attractive
rate.
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Once the decision has been made to engage, the bank has an opportunity to
proactively lead (nudge) customers in a compelling, dynamic, personalized direction.
They might offer a chat session to the borrower to discuss various rate plans because
analytics has shown this to be the most effective path to conversion. If the discussion
migrates to the phone, all relevant information is passed so that the customer does
not need to ‘start over’ with facts that have already been established.
Similarly, the existing customer that visits the bank’s website to check current
mortgage rates should present a huge red flag! The customer is clearly looking to
make a move from their current mortgage and the bank only has a matter of seconds
to engage. Using known information about the customer, payment history, property,
and other accounts held at the bank, a decision can be made in an instant to probe
deeper (“Are you looking to refinance?”) and retain the customer. The same
information may also point to an opportunity to not engage if the customer has a
poor track record, in which case the opportunity will—thankfully—shift to another
lender.
Analytics and Customer Effort
Analytics plays another key role in helping to evaluate the level of effort experienced
by the customer during the process. Extensive research by Matthew Dixon, Nick
Toman and Rick Delisi of the Corporate Executive Board, has proven time and again
that effort is the single biggest factor to customer loyalty. Measuring effort can be
done in several ways:
• Evaluating task completion rates in self-service (online and voice) to establish
how far customers can get before they need assistance.
• Examining opt-out points in voice self-service, especially when changes are
made to the options.
• Directly asking customers with a survey question: “The company made it
easy for me to handle my issue.” The customer is asked to answer (on a
common 1-7 scale used in most customer service surveys) whether they
agree or disagree with the statement.
At the same time, analytics can play an important role for the corporate marketing
leaders by helping them evaluate the overall effectiveness of their initiatives in real-
time. The merchant John Wanamaker is often quoted as saying: "Half the money I
spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." The right
framework for analysis enables continuous improvement in both promotional
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activities and customer acquisition by providing insights into resource, process and
management outcomes and limitations.
Conclusion
Taken together, these concepts provide insight every company needs to clearly
answer one question: What Customer Experience (CX) do you want to deliver? We’ve
examined the service delivery process, the role of Next Best Offer and Next Best
Action, applied service design principles to a standard experience many people have
every day, and outlined various methods of streamlining the journey.
One thing should be clear: continual application of these principles will shorten the
distance between the customer’s identified need and a branded solution offered by
the company. The nimble company that delivers smarter results faster will attract and
retain the most loyal customers, and do so at the lowest cost.
Solution Components
Genesys Customer Interaction Management (CIM) and Genesys Voice Platform
(GVP) is the framework used for routing and reporting on customer interactions.
Genesys Workload Management consists of four main components:
• intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD) - Supports customer service delivery
beyond the contact center by tracking, prioritizing and routing tasks or work
items.
• Workforce Optimization - Reduces staffing costs, improves productivity and
protects service levels with accurate forecasting and scheduling for all
interaction channels.
• Skills Management - Proactively assesses and maintains employee skills so
they have the right skill sets to handle work streams across all interaction
channels.
• Interactive Insights – Historical reporting that delivers a complete picture of
employee performance and work streams across multiple operations and
channels.
These components work together to provide visibility to all customer interactions,
which can then be tracked and used for forecasting and scheduling resources.
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Genesys Interaction Analytics refers to the analysis of all interactions between
contact centers and customers, including telephone, email, a web chat session, and
social media.
Genesys CX Analytics gives business-centric analysis of contact center data to provide
increased insight into the customer experience. Detailed reporting of application
performance includes call data, Voice User Interface elements, agent performance,
SLAs and more. Supervisors have everything they need to optimize efficiency and
performance, from a mobile-accessible supervisor desktop to real-time metrics,
reporting and call monitoring.
About Genesys
Genesys is driven by our cause to save the world from bad customer service. We do
it by applying a relentless focus on the consumer perspective of the customer
experience — and the impact it has on your business. Genesys works with its
customers and partners world-wide to deliver the experience that today’s digital
consumers want. It all adds up to one seamless customer conversation.
Great customer service extends beyond the contact center to the processes and work
streams involved in meeting your commitments. Genesys products give you insight
into and control over these processes, so you can truly track the customer experience
from end to end.
