When the customer promise is clarified, the next step is to explore the truth about the actual realityexperienced by customers and employees.
This intends both to get the actual pain points, difficulties and complexities that the customers face, and the perception they get from these.
Immersion Research is also called ethnological or observation research. They are conducted by meeting customers face-to-face and going through what they experienced, step by step, along the customer journeys. These surveys are useful to identify the pain points and difficulties they faced, and also to get detailed facts about what happened (emails, documents, photos, etc.), which help a great deal to understand the story and how to remediate.
My experience showed me that meeting 10-12 customers is sufficient to capture a great understanding of the actual customer journeys.
In these interviews, you have to look for patterns, not individual specificities. These patterns may depend on the customer types, this will lead you to create personas.
“One-on-one customers interviews are the best way to uncover the true customer experience.”
Immersion surveys are different from customer satisfaction surveys or focus groups.
Customer satisfaction surveys are based on a statistical average of evaluation provided by customers – this is very useful to evaluate whether the customer base is satisfied and why, but it doesn’t really help to define the target customer journeys, because it doesn’t provide a detailed end-to-end and step-by-step view of the customer experience for a given customer.
Focus groups are great to test new ideas, because they create a dynamic environment where participants react to others’ proposals and bring new ideas. They are less efficient in getting detailed feedback on existing customer journeys, because there are biases in the answers that participants may give in front of the others.
Customer interviews are not easy to conduct, if you want to really uncover useful insights.
It is crucial to
not to influence the responses, in particular by asking open questions,
not being judgmental,
always probe, in order to understand the customer's mental model and the reasons for acting.
The actual Customer Journey Map contains the details of the steps that customers go through, their pain points as well as their perception for each step or point of contact.
This is the baseline on which the target customer journeys will be designed. This documentation also helps to communicate within the company about the true sequence of events – which most staff and even managers don’t have in mind.
A customer journey map below shows:
I give below an example of simple customer journey in the SME corporate banking business: the customer’s request for financing its operating cycle (credit line).
“Journey Mapping is a key tool to identify innovation opportunities.”
It is crucial to evaluate the customer journeys as performed against the customer promise. Customer journeys are a way to deliver the customer promise – both have to be aligned.
In the above example, the promise “My requests are easily performed in a secured way” is not delivered.
Robot-advising for investments is becoming increasingly popular. For a bank that defines “advice by advisors” as its key value proposition, I am of the opinion that robot advisors shouldn’t be put directly into the customers’ hands, because it would contradict the value proposition – what is the advisor’s perceived value then? The best solution here would be to make robot advisors used by the advisors, in conjunction with other tools and expertise, to help them to provide the best possible investment advice to customers.
Life insurance companies promise to "take care" of their customers in case anything critical happens to them (death, accident, critical illness). But most of the time the insurance companies only focus on paying claims. In case of critical illness for example, they don't provide support to the customers to prevent the illness and stay in good health, or when they get notified they have a critical illness (what to do, where to go), or when they leave the hospital after a strong treatment (provide psychological support for them and their family). When conducting their transformation, most insurance companies would focus on providing digital features to make claims online for instance - but this doesn't deliver the promise of "taking care". A large part of the customers expectations are missing.
“A Customer Journey is not satisfactory in itself - it has to support the promise made to Customers.”
