Your customer journey is about way more than just your customer experience; it’s about how to run your business.

I’ve been working with high growth small businesses for the last 13 years; there are very few businesses who don’t want to create a really powerful customer experience, but the reality is most businesses think this journey is only about the set of interactions that their customer has.  They perceive it to be a tool for guiding basic human interaction.  The reality is that a really well-crafted customer journey is the bedrock to every decision that you make in your business.

If you truly understand exactly how you want your customer to experience their interaction with your business, you can use that knowledge to influence all the decision making that happens behind the scenes.  The award-winning Growth Framework ©  devised by Karen Dunne-Squire speaks about this specifically.  The Growth Framework is designed to teach you how to use your desires around the optimum customer experience to drive all of the decisions within your business.   The reality is that if your choices around software and systems, measuring and reporting, performance and resources, and about training and marketing are all informed by the one big question – what does our customer need to see? – then these decisions will be made in a more effective and holistic way.

Let’s talk about the reality of how:

Using the Proficient-ly five step decision making model will allow your organisation to holistically shape all areas of your business interaction around an acute understanding of how we serve our customer. 

Any high growth change programme requires the business to drive its decision making around one key goal or vision.  If that vision in your business is Customer Experience then you will always be making decisions that drive better revenue.

There are five key building blocks that are required to ensure you support a really excellent customer experience within your business and they will allow you to shape a high growth and high-performance organisation.

1. Resources

As soon as you have shaped the steps in your customer journey, you can begin to make really powerful decisions about the shape and the size of the team needed to deliver it.  An understanding of who should be in your business and how those teams should be grouped together is key for a successful team. Plans around what future recruitment might look like, an understanding of how the interaction between teams should be driven, and indeed a specific understanding of the roles and responsibilities within that team can come very easily from resource mapping your customer experience and ensuring that your business is set up to deliver a world class journey every time.

2. Marketing

Many businesses struggle to understand the exact function and deliverables of their marketing department, the content that marketing creates, the volume at which it creates it, and the schedule that it adheres to should all be driven by the specifics of the customer journey.  Auditing and evaluating each of the customer touchpoints in your journey and understanding the role that marketing should play to deliver these is a fundamental part of shaping a powerful and effective marketing division.  Using your expectations of what world class customer communication should look like to drive both the tactical content creation and the strategic objectives of your marketing department will ensure your marketing returns investment and serve your business well.

3. Performance Management

Every good business needs a clear set of performance tracks and measures in order to determine whether it is operating effectively.  Most businesses struggle to understand specifically what tracks and measures would add the most value and insight to their business. If you have created a clearly defined sales process that guides all of the steps in the customer interaction with your business, you have a starting point for identifying a set of really powerful KPIs. Analysing the data around your customer journey will give you and your team the capability of truly driving effective performance in your business.   Your customer journey map informs the way you manage performance, and all truly successful businesses use their sales process to drive their business analysis.

4. CRM

Most businesses are aware that good business technology will allow them to support more efficient and effective operations.  The major challenge here is deciding which CRM software will most effectively support your business and how that software should be built and developed in order to best serve your business needs.  A really well shaped customer journey map provides a brief for scoping out the CRM technology in your business.  Any organisation that attempts to embed software into its team without a clear understanding of the specific behaviours it is looking to drive is likely to fail to get the outcomes it deserves. If your business either has no effective CRM technology or technology that is not serving its purpose, going back to the drawing board and looking at the foundations of your customer experience map will allow you to make sure your CRM performs to the benefit of your business.

5. Training

Highly successful organisations have a keen focus on personal development.  The skill set and motivation of every individual in your team is fundamental to how well your business delivers.  Using your customer experience map as a baseline to understand what the key competences in your organisation are and how well equipped your team are to meet those competences is a crucial step in ensuring the right training and development is in place.  Once you have a clearly defined customer journey in your organisation, auditing that journey to understand exactly how well skilled your team are to deliver it will allow you to ensure that the aspirations you have written on paper become a reality in your business.

Many businesses attempt to make decisions in the five areas above in isolation for one specific customer journey.  The challenge here is that the decisions you make may not be well aligned with your aspirations to generate really high revenue.  At Proficient-ly we talk about your profit triangle.  This is about connecting your profit with your customers and your employees and making sure that all three of these areas are aligned. To be sure that your business drives exactly the right outcomes, use the Proficient-ly five step decision making model to drive a business that will always achieve its growth aspirations!