Report: The Shift To Customer Journey Insights

We just published a Temkin Group report, The Shift To Customer Journey Insights. Here’s the executive summary:

Customer insights are critical to customer experience programs. However, current insights’ efforts tend to focus on individual interactions rather than on a customer’s entire journey, and as a result, they often fail to provide a complete picture of a customer’s experience with the company. This report helps companies shift their insights efforts from concentrating narrowly on single transactions to focusing broadly on customers’ journeys.

Here are some highlights :

• We developed an approach to help companies create a comprehensive view of journeys called Customer Journey Insights (CJI), which is made up of five strategies: Internal Journey Alignment, Journey Data Farming, Journey Performance Tracking, Journey Visualization, and Journey Prioritization.
• We share 20 examples of best practices from companies that are applying these strategies to develop a more complete understanding of their customers’ journeys.
• To help companies master these strategies, we have identified three stages organizations proceed through on their path to enabling customer journeys: 1) Customer Journey Orientation, 2) Customer Journey Enablement, and 3) Customer Journey Mastery.

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Here are the best practices focused around five strategies for shifting towards customer journey insights:

1. Internal Journey Alignment. Shift the company’s mindset away from siloed interaction success to customer goal facilitation.
2. Journey Data Farming. Tap into adjacent data sources and make linkages across channels.
3. Journey Performance Tracking. Overhaul metrics to measure performance across customer journeys.
4. Journey Visualization. Create mechanisms for communicating insights in a way that reinforces the centrality of customer journeys.
5. Journey Prioritization. Focus on the journeys, customer segments, and channels that are strategic business priorities.

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Report: The Four Customer Experience Core Competencies (Free)

If you are only going to read only one thing about customer experience, then this report is it. It’s the blueprint for building a customer-centric organization… and it’s free.

We just published a Temkin Group report, The Four CX Core Competencies. This blueprint to building a customer-centric organization is an update to our groundbreaking research that was originally published in 2010 and updated in 2013.

Temkin Group has conducted multiple large-scale studies demonstrating that customer experience (CX) is highly correlated with loyalty across many different industries, in both business-to-consumer and business-to-business environments. When customers have a good experience with a company, they are more likely to repurchase from the company, try its new offerings, and recommend it to others.

While many companies try to improve their CX by making superficial changes, Temkin Group has found that the only path to lasting differentiation and increased loyalty is to build a customer-centric culture. Temkin Group has studied hundreds of companies to uncover the difference between CX leaders and their less successful peers, and has identified four CX competencies that companies must master if they wish to build and sustain CX differentiation:

1. Purposeful Leadership: Operate consistently with a clear set of values. (see video)
2. Compelling Brand Values: Deliver on your brand promises to customers. (see video)
3. Employee Engagement: Align employees with the goals of the organization. (see video)
4. Customer Connectedness: Infuse customer insight across the organization. (see video)

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This whiteboard video describes the Four CX Core Competencies:

Here are the best practices described in the report:

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Report: Capturing Insights from Online Customer Communities

We published a Temkin Group report, Capturing Insights from Online Customer Communities. Here’s the executive summary:

Companies across a range of industries use online customer communities to augment their customer support, marketing, and product innovation efforts. However, when used thoughtfully, these online communities can provide value far beyond their original purpose. Because these communities signify an ongoing relationship between the company and participating customers, customer insights teams will find that these forums contain a treasure trove of insights. As a result of these deeper relationships, online communities offer unique advantages to voice of the customer (VoC) programs, including Always-on Feedback, Broad and Diverse Insights, Continuous Dialogue, Peer-to-Peer Dynamics, and Employee-to-Community Interactivity. These unique advantages can help companies adapt to the five Customer Insight Trends that are changing the face of VoC programs: 1) Deep empathy, not stacks of metrics, 2) Continuous insights, not periodic studies, 3) Customer journeys, not isolated interactions, 4) Useful prescriptions, not past descriptions, and 5) Enterprise intelligence, not customer feedback. To help organizations get the most value from their communities, Temkin Group has highlighted best practices for capturing and using insights from customer communities across these five trends. Companies also must plan for the entire community lifecycle to be successful; this includes Determine Strategy, Structure Community, Recruit Members, Grow and Maintain, and Close Down.

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Online customer communities have some unique attributes that make them a valuable component to voice of the customer programs (one of the 12 figures in the report):

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Report: State of Voice of the Customer Programs, 2016

We published a Temkin Group report, State of Voice of the Customer Programs, 2016. This is the sixth year that we’ve benchmarked the competency & maturity of voice of the customer programs within large organization. Here’s the executive summary:

For the sixth straight year, Temkin Group has benchmarked the competency and maturity levels of voice of the customer (VoC) programs within large organizations. We found that while most companies think that their VoC efforts are successful, less than one-third of companies actually consider themselves good at reviewing implications that cut across the organization. Respondents think that in the future, the most important source of insights will be customer interaction history and the least important source will be multiple-choice questions. And although respondents believe that technology will play an increasingly important role in their VoC efforts, they also cite “integration across systems” as the biggest obstacle to their VoC success, and this concern has only grown in the past year. In addition to asking questions about their VoC program, we also had respondents complete Temkin Group’s VoC Competency and Maturity Assessment, which examines capabilities across what we call the “Six Ds”: Detect, Disseminate, Diagnose, Discuss, Design, and Deploy. Only 16% of companies have reached the two highest levels of VoC maturity, while 43% remain in the bottom two levels. When we compared higher-scoring VoC programs with lower-scoring programs, we found that companies with mature programs are more successful, they focus more on analytics, and they have more full-time staff, more strongly coordinated efforts, and more involved senior executives.

See the State of VoC reports from 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014, and 2015.

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Here are the results from Temkin Group’s VoC Competency & Maturity Assessment:

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Report: Five C’s of Mobile VoC Disruption

We just published a Temkin Group report, Five C’s of Mobile VoC Disruption: Best Practices for Embracing the Power of Mobile in Your Voice of the Customer Program.

As mobile continues to grow in importance, companies will need to renovate their voice of the customer (VoC) programs. Why? Because mobile is more than just another communications channel – it is transforming the way that companies and customers interact. To help companies modernize their VoC programs to account for this increase in mobile usage, we’ve identified the key areas in which mobile is different from other channels, what we call the “Five C’s of Mobile VoC Disruption: “Condensed, Comprehensive, Current, Conversational, and Contextual. These disruptive characteristics will force companies to redefine how they capture, share, and act on customer insights. We’ve identified more than 20 best practices that span all areas of a VoC program, including soliciting in-the-moment feedback for key interactions and accelerating the sharing of useful insights. In order to use mobile successfully, companies need to evolve through three stages of change: 1) Mobile-Enabled, 2) Mobile-Adjusted, and 3) Mobile-First.

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Here’s an overview of the Five C’s:

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Report: Customer-Infused Process Improvement

We just published a Temkin Group report, Customer-Infused Process Improvement, which provides five strategies for instilling customers’ needs into process improvement methodologies. Here’s the executive summary:

Process improvement and customer experience have traditionally served different roles in a company. However, these two disciplines are starting to intersect as customer experience looks to process improvement to operationalize key customer interactions and process improvement needs customer experience to provide customer-focused insights and continually monitor new processes. Temkin Group proposes that companies bring these two approaches together into Customer-Infused Process Change. This report highlights five strategies critical to driving this new approach: Prioritize Improvements Across Customer Journeys, Embrace Deep Customer Empathy, Involve Customers in Solution Development, Innovate to Meet Latent Needs, and Measure Success with Customer-Focused Metrics. To make process improvement efforts more customer-centric, organizations need to infuse these strategies across all aspects of process improvement.

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It’s time for process improvement to become more focused on customers. Rather than abandoning existing process improvement methodologies, Temkin Group recommends bringing a customer orientation into your efforts. We call this approach Customer-Infused Process Change (CiPC), which we define as:

Driving improvements based on a deep understanding of customer needs.

The report provides best practices across five strategies of CiPC:

1. Prioritize Improvements Across Customer Journeys: By understanding customer interactions in the context of their broader journeys, companies can invest in process improvements projects that have the most impact on the customer’s experience.
2. Embrace Deep Customer Empathy: In order to effect sustainable changes, employees impacted by redesigned processes need to understand why these changes are important to customers.
3. Involve Customers in Solution Development: Process improvement efforts must have resources available to ensure that ongoing, incremental changes can be made based on this customer input.
4. Innovate to Meet Latent Needs: Customers can’t always articulate what they want; instead, they often describe a slightly improved version of what they already know.
5. Measure Success with Customer-Focused Metrics: Companies can’t measure the success of process improvement efforts with internally focused, operational metrics.

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The bottom line: Process improvements need more customer insights.

Report: Make Your VoC Action-Oriented

We published a Temkin Group report, Make Your VoC Action-Oriented. Here’s the executive summary:

Companies recognize that customer feedback and insights are critical for understanding customers, so they often create Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs as one of their first customer experience priorities. While most respondents within large organizations believe that these efforts have been successful, Temkin Group has found that an overwhelming number of VoC programs are still in very early stages of maturity. These immature programs overly focus on collecting feedback and don’t focus enough on driving action based on insights from the feedback. Our research shows that simplification is a key path to VoC maturity. This report identifies five strategies for simplifying VoC programs: Stakeholder Empathy, Tailored Insights, Feedback Rationalization, Loop-Closing, and Customer Journey Alignment. As companies adopt these five strategies, VoC teams must learn new skills and become research generalists, business consultants, compelling communicators, portfolio managers, and value creators.

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Here are the best practices we discuss in the report:

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Report: State of Voice of the Customer Programs, 2015

We published a Temkin Group report, State of Voice of the Customer Programs, 2015. This is the fifth year that we’ve benchmarked the competency & maturity of voice of the customer programs within large organization. Here’s the executive summary:

For the fifth year, Temkin Group has benchmarked the voice of the customer (VoC) programs within large organizations. We found that while most organizations consider their VoC efforts to be successful, less than one-third of organizations actually believe they are good at making changes to the business based on these insights. Respondents think that the most important source of insights in the future will be customer interaction history, and they think that going forward, multiple-choice questions will be the least important. Respondents believe that technology will play an increasingly important role in their efforts, but the largest obstacle to VoC success remains integration across systems. In addition to asking questions about their VoC program, we also had respondents complete Temkin Group’s VoC Competency and Maturity Assessment, which examines capabilities across what we call the “Six Ds”: Detect, Disseminate, Diagnose, Discuss, Design, and Deploy. Although only 16% of companies have reached the two highest levels of VoC maturity, this is still an improvement from the 11% last year. When we compared high-scoring VoC programs with lower-scoring programs, we found that companies with mature programs are more successful, focus more on analytics, have more full-time staff, have more strongly coordinated efforts, and have more involved senior executives.

See the State of VoC reports from 2010, 2011, 2013, and 2014.

Download report for $195

Here are the results from Temkin Group’s VoC Competency & Maturity Assessment:

Download report for $195

Maximizing Value From Customer Journey Mapping

We just published a Temkin Group report, Maximizing Value From Customer Journey Mapping. Here’s the executive summary:

Customer Journey Maps (CJMs) are a valuable tool for understanding how customers truly interact across an entire organization, but companies aren’t capturing enough value from their CJM efforts. Creating a CJM is only the first step in the process for change; the real benefit comes from using the insights from CJMs to drive action. In this report, we identify 23 best practices for using CJMs, and these practices cut across five areas: 1) Find and Fix Problems, 2) Build a Customer-centric Mindset, 3) Design Innovative Experiences, 4) Create Strategic Alignment, and 5) Refine Customer Measurement. To truly maximize value from customer journey maps, companies need to set themselves up for success by establishing organizational alignment, determining if outside help is needed, training key stakeholders in customer journey mapping, and scaling customer journey mapping techniques across the organization by employing Customer Journey Thinking.

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Here are the 23 best practices in the report:

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The bottom line: Get more value from your CJM efforts.

Report: Unlocking Customer Insights From Contact Centers

We just published a Temkin Group report, Unlocking Customer Insights From Contact Centers: From Agent Productivity to Enterprise Intelligence. Here’s the executive summary:

Companies have traditionally viewed their contact centers as cost centers and have consequently focused most of their energy on making agents as efficient as possible. However, companies are now beginning to realize that contact centers actually contain a wealth of deep, untapped information about customers. Temkin Group recommends that companies tap into this rich vein of information by shifting their focus away from agent productivity and towards enterprise intelligence. To construct a more holistic picture of their customers’ experiences, companies should take the unsolicited, unstructured voice of the customer (VoC) feedback they capture in the contact center and combine it with data they collect from other sources, such as CRM and digital analytics. In this report, we outline how companies’ efforts should shift across each of the Six D’s of a VOC program: Detect, Disseminate, Diagnose, Discuss, Design, and Deploy. To start the transformation away from agent productivity and towards enterprise intelligence, companies need to focus on data integration, analyzing the entire customer journey, forming a cohesive governance structure, and developing new roles and skills for employees.

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In the report, we describe these best practices for shifting the focus of customer insights in the contact center from agent effectiveness to enterprise insights:

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