Officials at Strativity Group, the world’s leading customer experience consultancy, recently unveiled Customer Types and a revamped user interface within Touchpoint Dashboard. Customer Types enable users to create, manage, and relate groups of customer categories directly into their journey maps. This feature is complemented by a revamped Interface that moves nearly every complex interaction into a simpler, easy design for Touchpoint Dashboard users.
Loyalty360 talked to Peter Haid, chief product officer, Strativity; and Strativity CEO Lior Arussy to learn more about this new technology that can help boost brand loyalty.
Can you talk about the genesis of Customer Types and how this will enhance customer engagement/customer experience/customer loyalty?
Haid: Journey maps are typically put into the perspective of the customer. but we noticed two struggles with this in the marketplace.
The first problem we saw was that those perspectives were never consistent. While some companies may use a persona as the customer lens, others would want to look at it more broadly by concepts like segment or product. Documenting a persona would look completely different than documenting a segment.
The second problem we saw is that journey maps are never at the same granularity. Some companies like to journey map the macro level with large sweeping concepts for touchpoints. Other companies prefer to go down the micro level with every little detailed interaction for touchpoints. Touchpoint Dashboard handles this hierarchy of macro to micro very well. Customer types will vary depending on this granularity so we also wanted to solve for that.
Customer Type was introduced to solve these issues. We enable a library of Customer Types that are flexible enough to handle all of these combinations. Each Customer Type is associated with a journey map and touchpoints that apply. Journey maps may contain multiple Customer Types so that users don’t have a lot of rework to make map after map. Furthermore, each Customer Type can show up in multiple maps meaning that if you change the Customer Type once, it will propagate to all the maps where it has an association.
Ultimately, this improves customer loyalty and engagement by making it simple to overlay the true perspective of a customer.
How does this feature humanize customers within the context of a journey map?
Haid: Visually, the application of a Customer Type gives an immediate humanization to the journey map. When creating touchpoints and attributes for a map the face of the Customer Type is right there to remind you the perspective to embody. In addition, the map becomes more human with the specificity applied to the Customer Type. Rather than journey map for just broad situations, Customer Types can be as specific as a single customer or persona.
For these circumstances the touchpoints will be very granular and showcase the exact actions, thoughts, and emotions in a very actionable way. Let’s take it even one step further… if “Pamela the Persona” were a Customer Type Touchpoint Dashboard can show you every journey map where Pamela shows up. This gives a company plenty of perspective on all the things that are influencing her concerns to find trends in how the interactions and what feelings must be protected to ensure better loyalty.
Why are Customer Types and in-journey validation some of the most requested features?
Haid: Customer Types and Journey Validation provide companies with a one-stop-shop for getting the results and ROI out of journey management. Customer Types were frequently brought to our product team as a request masked as personas. We saw the request for personas in many different forms and personas were defined so differently in the use cases our customers needed.
Our solution was to create something broad enough to fit all these use cases which is why we built Customer Type. The demand for this was driven by education our users receive when learning the concepts of journey mapping. The Customer Type is typically a lens that is derived before a map is even created. Our previous version of the platform was not missing this concept but it was not making it as saleable as the demand required. Now it is very easy and very scalable.
Likewise, it is a best-practice to validate a journey map with customers before action items are pursued. Prior to releasing journey validation, our clients would need to take the context of the journey map and relay it to customers in focus groups or formal voice-of-customer research projects. We simplified it by integrating this step directly in the platform by allowing the design of a validation survey. The surveys are launched through URLs we generate that display the desired portions of the journey to customers. The results of Journey Validation with Touchpoint Dashboard are that user can see if the touchpoints are correct, in the right order, and how they are performing in the eyes of their customer. The reports and results of the survey are kept right there in the journey map easy decision making for action plans.
How would you describe the current state of CX and how technology fits in?
Arussy: Customer Experience today is heavily focused on Voice of Customer and incremental improvements to customer experience. We have seen a great deal of effort and energy spent on technology, but measurable results are still limited.
Where do you envision the future of CX headed with regards to customer engagement/customer loyalty?
Arussy: We see customer experience splitting into two categories: Strategic and technical. Organizations utilize customer experience as a revenue and profit-driven effort. This type of customer experience effort will require a major upgrade in capabilities, internal resources, and activities. The other segment of customer experience will remain technical in nature, focusing on reducing customer pain points. Strategic customer experience will be delivering quantifiable customer loyalty, while technical customer experience will lower customer defections.