The Customer Journey Workshop: An Integral Part of Customer-Centric Growth Strategies

Customer Centric

Our approach to product development is built around the customer. We look at all of your customer touchpoints from awareness through to retention. The customer journey is the most useful starting point for continued innovation and value creation. We want to ensure that your customers enjoy that journey with you, not your competitors. To achieve this, we zoom out to see your entire offer in context. The workshop is designed to solve problems. The outcome is a clear action plan that you and your team can implement together. This is achieved by discovering potential opportunities and removing barriers. With a clear overview, you’ll be able to clearly prioritize the action steps you need to take. This kind of objective analysis can be hard without the input of a third party. That’s where we come in.

Common Challenges

Our clients normally approach us when they feel stuck in some way. Because it’s evidence based and data driven, our Customer Journey Workshop can remove the feeling of strategic paralysis that leads to indecision. Clients are often successful with their core business, but they’re at a crossroads and need to make an important decision. Sometimes it can be hard to know exactly where to turn or what actions to prioritize. This is particularly true when there are many potential solutions on the table. Which one do we choose? How can we decide which option will create the most value? Common challenges include:

• The need to innovate and grow: The core business is digitized to deliver services to known target groups.

There’s a strong desire to identify opportunities for growth, as well as retain existing customers.

The CJW takes a holistic view of both market trends and the customer journey to uncover new business potential.

Common challenges include:

• The need to innovate and grow: The core business is digitized to deliver services to known target groups. There’s a strong desire to identify opportunities for growth, as well as retain existing customers. The CJW takes a holistic view of both market trends and the customer journey to uncover new business potential.

• The need to prioritize: Several initiatives are run in parallel. They’re owned and implemented by different departments (“We’re successful but we’re not sure why”).

This leads to communication problems and can make attribution a real challenge, leading to overspend.

The CJW can reveal better ways to share data and improve the efficiency of communication.

• The need to align: Different organizational units work on the same initiative from within their separate silos. These could be product, UX, marketing and customer service.

This leads to the Silo Effect which creates duplication and an inconsistent customer experience (we’re back to that first statistic again).

The CJW unifies all departments and stakeholders to make them feel involved and ensure they’re working with a single vision.

The 4-Step Process

1. Map Existing Knowledge

We review all the existing material you have about your customers and their interaction with the business. This material could be anything from customer personas to existing touchpoints and solutions.

We work together with the client to collate the data you have and to fill the information gaps.

For example, we sometimes find that clients don’t have enough user data from Analytics. We then support the client to gather this data and share it throughout the organization. Map Existing Knowledge We review all the existing material you have about your customers and their interaction with the business. This material could be anything from customer personas to existing touchpoints and solutions.

We work together with the client to collate the data you have and to fill the information gaps.

For example, we sometimes find that clients don’t have enough user data from Analytics. We then support the client to gather this data and share it throughout the organization.

2. Link the Journeys

In most customer journeys there’ll be some overlap between the different target groups and stakeholders. For example, customer service might not be used to working with marketing, but the customer sees both departments as part of the same brand.

By identifying who these different groups are, we can start to visualize how all these touchpoints relate to each other. This creates a holistic picture and leads to clarity.

3. Map the Current Touchpoints

We clearly mark out the journeys of the distinct target groups. We then review the current touchpoints to see how the customer’s needs are currently being fulfilled.

Maybe everything is perfect, but there are too many resources in one place? Maybe there are gaps. The touchpoint map will reveal those gaps.

4. Identify Potential and Prioritize

When we have the map of the current customer offer, we then look at the areas for improvement. For example, the existing strengths and weaknesses might be in the sales funnel.

Do certain target groups have certain problems in common? Could they benefit from products and solutions that you already offer?

What to Expect

The results of the workshop vary depending on the client and their business.

Because we take a macro view of the business and its customers, we’re able to recommend a wide variety of initiatives. Opportunities for improvement can be discovered at every stage of the sales funnel.

These include:

• Improving the workflow of the existing Customer Relationship Management system
• Taking a more patient approach to conversion by guiding customers along their journey until they feel ready
• Setting up a portal for partners and colleagues to share user data more effectively

The DPM Way

We love to collaborate.

We consistently see that outcomes have greater impact and sustainability when the whole team is part of the conversation.

We see the client’s problem as our problem. We try to find the angle that works best for our clients, and we adapt our approach to help them meet their goals.

We’re here to facilitate growth; sometimes listening, sometimes guiding but always bringing the focus back to the customer and how we can serve them better.

Involve

We make sure that we involve all relevant disciplines in every workshop. This holistic approach encourages dialogue between the sometimes disparate areas of product, customer services and marketing.

Each member of these specialized teams can bring insight to the conversation. When a team member feels involved and listened to, they also feel valued and more motivated to implement new initiatives.

Customer Journey Mapping

In the example below, we visualize a customer journey together with a client from the health industry to see how the pieces of work fit together.

Takeaways

The Customer Journey Workshop is an integral part of an organization’s digital strategy. It provides a framework to identify growth potential from the customer’s perspective:

• It’s an important step in creating a truly customer-centric digital experience
• It can be used at any stage of growth to improve existing services and innovate new solutions
• It helps to ensure alignment across countries and buy-in from the most important stakeholders
• It neutralizes the paralysis of not knowing what to do next

Customer expectations are evolving rapidly. The Customer Journey Workshop is all about closing the gaps between what customers expect and what you deliver.

It’s all about connection. And the connection feels good!

Ready to learn more about our Customer Journey Workshops?