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Driving Positive Word-of-Mouth Through the Customer Lifecycle

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Hank Brigman has many years of experience sharing methodologies, tips and best practices on customer service. This is part of  a series he’s shared with Desk.com from his upcoming book TOUCHPOiNT Power.

Customer journeys and product journeys are part and parcel to developing assets for a successful organization. Where the product journey creates a physical asset, the customer journey creates a perceptual asset. The asset is the perception throughout the customer lifecycle — good or bad — of the organization, product/service or brand. Together, these two assets drive the organization’s “identity” or brand. Positive customer journeys create positive word of mouth, which creates a positive brand.

To better understand your customers’ journeys and to enhance your efforts at brand building, you must build listening posts along the way to collect customer feedback and better understand, respond to, and extend the customer lifecycle.

Short and Targeted

Listening posts are an essential tool and the survey itself is a touchpoint. Listening post surveys are typically short and targeted in their focus.  For instance, the survey at the end of a call to a call center is a listening post to gather feedback on the performance provided during that phone call. Equally important for the customer is knowing not just that someone is listening but that someone has heard what the customer has to say and is responding. Even if the customer feedback is negative, a positive listening post experience can help transform that into positive experience and word of mouth. Listening posts can facilitate sharing important voice-of-customer information across departments and breaking down barriers.

Our departments can each have their own budgets, own metrics, own way of doing things. It’s not uncommon in large organizations for customer service to get a call from a customer about a sales or marketing program that the customer service rep knows little or nothing about, and that can create a negative experience and influence word-of-mouth. Listening posts are a giant step toward sharing this information across departments and breaking down barriers.

This siloed environment is a major contributor to the core customer experience problem of inconsistent touchpoints. To break it down, we must get better at applying our customer journey steps to their needs as they progress through the stages of the customer lifecycle. If we remain siloed, than we focus more on our department’s needs than the customer’s needs, and this does not create an asset that benefits our organization. By helping the customer, we help ourselves.

For customer journeys to be most successful, each step along the journey should work with the previous step to increase value for both the customer and organization. Each step should reduce waste, and produce the desired end-result asset — the organization’s Identity as a perceptual asset in the mind of your customer.

To do so, the customer journey must be viewed and approached in the exact same way as a product journey — it requires a discipline that applies the same rigor and structure and the ability to, through listening posts, to gather information and adapt. This structure needs to be based on everyone working together to produce a designed output – a positive perceptual asset.


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