onlineCustomer Experience (CX) is in vogue, as Google hits for CX confirm, which have risen from 80 million in 2011 to over a billion in 2018, apart from the fact that CX has been mentioned in many studies as a top management issue, even though companies are still struggling with it. Nowadays, it is obviously not the price-performance ratio that is decisive, but the best price-experience ratio in a price range, and people no longer speak of digital transformation, but digitization in the sense of optimal integration of the digital and analog worlds.

Having said that, please keep in mind, that CX is just one of five perspectives on a touchpoint. In addition to CX, there are the (digital) efficiency as well as the on-, up- and cross-selling potentials that manage data intelligence and the employee touchpoint interaction.

According to Dr. Claudio Felten, Managing Partner and Managing Director of CMX Consulting GmbH, specialized in customer management, sales and pricing strategies, the Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) is deemed the most important element and starting point of every consideration. He sees CJM as an important strategic weapon, that however doesn’t lead to success in isolation and doesn’t make everything obsolete that already exists. He emphasizes, therefore, that in addition to the CJ as an outside-in perspective, the Customer Life Cycle (CLC) as an inside-out perspective continues to be important, since it reinforces customer-related business goals. Hence, in practice, CJM and CLC must be interconnected.

Other well-known aspects are the framing or the "job to be done" phenomenon., Dr. Felten points out. “Journeys must always be considered for specific contexts of personas. In extreme cases, a person may appear in several personas, or a persona may have multiple journeys. Ultimately, these are all just steps on the way to the "1 human = 1 persona" approach and individually perceived Journeys”, he explains.

The knowledge from the Kano model, a theory for product development and customer satisfaction developed in the 1980s by Professor Noriaki Kano, which classifies customer preferences into five categories, stating that first basic, then performance and enthusiasm factors must be considered, continues to exist.

It is standard that there is a Journey for different Personas, but a Journey can, for instance, also vary by application or region. Hence, in addition to the so-called Macro Journey at touchpoints or groups of touchpoints, there are particularly Micro Journeys, which can be thought of like “transaction” journeys that go deeper into the specific intentions of customers.

In a nutshell, there are a variety of touchpoints and events, or as the Strativity Group explains it: “Follow the Macro-to-Micro journey mapping chain that links from Relationship to Transaction to Interaction.”

However, on the one hand, touchpoints are not equally relevant to the overall experience, and on the other hand, a lack of focus often leads to CX initiatives failing. Besides methods for assessing the relevance and the current experience, Phil Winters' IMPACT (Ignore-Monitor-Participate-Activate-ConTrol) methodology could be used to prioritize touchpoints. However, when evaluating the current experience from the customer's point of view, caution is advised: usually only the absolute experience is measured, but in addition to this, the relative experience in the competition context must be considered, too!

By Daniela La Marca