With touchpoints seemingly ever-increasing, and customer expectations high, how journeys are designed and maintained is more important than ever. AI-powered tools, enhanced customer listening techniques and careful communication are becoming essential to ensure that CX meets the mark.
Our webinar series, All Access: CX Design and Journey Management brought together experts from retail, financial services, hospitality and telecoms to share how they approach customer journey management and design that delights customers, from pre- to post- purchase.
Read on for the key insights from each session and to watch the live interviews, catch all sessions on-demand on our new Plus site.
How Wayfair drives loyalty with post-purchase journeys
Lariane Rossanese, global head of product design for supply chain network, enterprise and service tech at Wayfair, kicked off the day’s sessions explaining how Wayfair has redesigned its post-purchase journey, and why.
“We truly believe that the biggest challenges happen after the purchase… this is exactly where the loyalty and the repeat rates happen — or it could totally fail if we don’t do a good job there,” she said.
Rossanese said that her team combines CX and operational metrics to ascertain where best to focus resources. CSAT, NPS and CES are all used. She advised focusing on the most meaningful metrics, rather than overwhelming teams with lots of data. She continued: “For us, NPS and CSAT are main indicators, combined with business metrics like contact rate and resolution time.” The team uses “fast lanes” to fix urgent issues quickly, while cycle planning is for longer-term priorities.
On artificial intelligence (AI), Rossanese said that she uses it to “automate repetitive tasks, ensure consistency and extract insights from large volumes of data”. The design teams, she noted, “use [large language models] to synthesize information”.
The team runs continuous UX audits each semester. These deep dives are aimed at identifying friction points. Rossanese explained that her team is figuring out how to make these more cross-functional, “because design working in silos can cause bottlenecks”. The importance of cross-functional collaboration was emphasized throughout the series.
Watch the full session on-demand here.
How to operationalize CX
While most companies like to say they are customer-centric, many do not make this tangible through process and structure. Jeff Dahms, director of CX research and insights at insurance firm, Physicians Mutual, joined the series to explain how brands can go beyond lip-service and properly embed customer-centricity into operations.
Having set up CX functions from scratch several times, Dahms is in a great spot to advise. He recommended taking it one-step-at-a-time, saying “the way to formalize [CX] is not to come with a giant strategy… It’s taking [the business] along one step at a time, proving your value in small places, with the right people who can then champion for you.” He called this approach “guerilla wins”: proving value with small wins, bit by bit.
Linking efforts to growth and retention is essential, he said. On metrics, he recommended not overthinking it, “I don’t really care what metric you choose, just choose one… It gives you a way to start every conversation”. Speed and time savings, though, are easy wins. Saving colleagues time can create advocates in other departments even before financial benefits are visible.
He referred to a “cycle of success”, which he described as:
- Hear from customers through Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs and social data
- Translate data into insights
- Communicate insights to the business, focusing on what they enable rather than just numbers
- Empower employees to act on your insights
Once these connections are built “it’s a flywheel that just keeps enhancing and feeding itself”.
Watch the full session on-demand here.
How Hyatt saves money and connects digital and on-property experiences with research and service blueprints
Gavin Johnston joined Hyatt in the middle of the pandemic amid layoffs and widely-known difficulties in the hospitality sector. While challenging, this presented an opportunity for a new research function.
From the get-go, Johnston focused on proving ROI, saying “we really needed to articulate what the financial benefits are”. Even smaller design improvements can have a huge impact on the bottom line. Johnston explained: “If a new design only shaves one second off an employee’s workflow, that can translate into millions of dollars saved per year”. Similarly, reducing just two steps in the bookings process “increased bookings by maybe one percent. But that one percent means millions and millions of dollars”.
As well as the benefits of research, Johnston pointed out the cost of not doing research. Investing in processes with no testing can cost millions of dollars – which could be saved by researching first.
The discussion then turned towards “service blueprints”. In this, Hyatt is moving beyond traditional journey maps.
“A journey assumes a linear pattern. A blueprint captures everything that influences the experience, from digital to on-property”, Johnston said.
Blueprints allow Hyatt to map digital and physical interactions, identifying where behavior change is possible and understanding where design can (and cannot) drive business outcomes. To make these blueprints actionable across teams, the blueprints are broken down into role-specific actions. Small experimentation teams have been set up to turn insights into tests.
Johnston said: “We revisit these quarterly and have a team dedicated to small experiments anything from a centimetre off a masthead to rethinking the spa experience.”
The goal, Johnston said, is to create a seamless experience between the app and in-person touchpoints, ultimately increasing engagement. This is not without its challenges. “Guests don’t open their laptops in the hotel — or even their phones, except for the digital key. So, we’re working out how to engage more meaningfully.”
He also shared his “beyond personas” approach, in which he and his team factor in contextual behaviours that may move someone from one persona to another. He gave an example, saying “on a business trip, I’m ‘business guy.’ But if my wife joins for the weekend, my needs change completely — now I want restaurant reservations or a spa trip.” In this, he recommended designing for these transitions: “We’re all a multitude of personas. The power is in anticipating when someone shifts and meeting them there.”
Watch the full session on-demand here.
How BT Group simplifies customer journeys – even for complex products
With telecom market saturation almost at 100 percent in many countries, BT Group is seeking new ways to stand out in the crowded market. Hassan Jaafar, product squad lead for strategy, IoT and Connected Home at the British telecoms giant explained, “at least at BT and EE, we need to be providing top quality experiences, and there has to be more network reliability and seamless service, which, over period of time, will give more retention and build customer loyalty”.
Hyperpersonalization is a focus: “We have a lot of data points, and we use different partners and internal teams to harness these. We then leverage them to give unique experience to our customers,” Jaafar said.
Journey simplification, especially for complex product offerings, is a priority. Building intuitive, customer-centric journeys is critical. “You can design complicated products in a simple and intuitive way, and differentiate that for less technical customers as well as more advanced users”, he explained. To illustrate this, he drew on the recently-launched Wifi Enhancer product.
“We made sure that the customer journey is simple. Customers can simply add this product at the click of a button,” he said. It’s crucial that support staff have the right information.
“Agent support is really strong for the [Wifi Enhancer] product, so we’ve got diagnostics which means our agents can see how the product is being used and which features are prioritized. If there's an issue, they can provide different levels of support, starting from simple to technical.”
The team uses continuous feedback loops to maintain product evolution based on customer and employee input. “You can design the product, but you have to stay close to agents and customers through community forums, which keep feeding back allowing us to keep evolving our products.”
Watch the full session on-demand here and explore the full CX Network+ catalogue here.