Courtesy of Shift Happen's James Feldman, below is a transcript of his speaking session on 'Using CX Journeys To Improve Operations and the Customer Experience' to Build a Thriving Enterprise that took place at the Customer Experience Excellence Virtual Conference.

Session Information:

Using CX Journeys To Improve Operations and the Customer Experience

1) Provides a comprehensive pictorial of the various paths the customer transits through to obtain service from the company.
2) Provides a great assessment of the current state of customer practices and customer health.
3) Provides a great assessment of the future (needed) state of the optimal way to provide customer service that would enhance the service quality level vs. current state.
4) Provides a gateway to be able to map out internal service pathways as well as to document existing gaps and opportunities in those pathways.

The top things you will learn by attending this presentation

• What a customer journey map is and what it is used for.

• What a customer service map is and what it used for.
• How a customer journey map and a customer service map relate and map to each other
• The business benefits of developing a best practice customer journey.
• How to build a hierarchy of customer journey maps such that a customer service map is a natural outcome of the customer journey mapping process.

Session Transcript:

Problems, what a welcome, James Bellville furniture in Chicago.

And he will be talking about using CX Journeys to improve operations and customer experience.

James Fellman is an international speaker with over a thousand presentations author, 13 books, an advisor to dozens of organizations on customer service, change management and competitive differentiation.

Yes, yes, Innovative organizations and C suite executives to overcome challenges, achieve goals, and deliver extraordinary customer experiences, to get profitable results, James, welcome, uh, and uh, it's all yours.

Well, thankfully, we got rid of Murphy, and we're able to present.

So first of all, thank you for your patience. Second of all, you'll understand why the name of my company is Shift Happens, because that's what we were just experiencing.

That being said, let's do a deep dive into the customer service journey.

But today's customer not only determines where and how they buy, but it's always one click or step away from abandoning their journey if their expectation experience is not met.

And I refer to that is the davia I F, M from the customer standpoint. What's in it for me?

Look.

It's important to remember that the customer journeys are not created, They are discovered, and I refer to that as The journey to Bright Ideas.

What do I mean by that?

Customers expect businesses to provide relevant, personalized experiences driven by their current preferences in recent interactions.

Now, that's a lot of words, but it's the data points.

It's the data points that connects the millions of events from your customers, point.

View.

And it's data driven from your collection of the dead.

Now, it's been said that, by the end of next year, there will be 6000 gigabytes of information on every person in the world, over 80.

That's terabytes, trillions, of terabytes of information.

So you have to understand that it's about how to connect those interactions, and quickly discover the most important part of the journey, and the undertaking in real time as we go across the various touchpoints data, collections, et cetera.

Now, I want to explain, I am not from a big company.

I advice big companies.

This is a partial list of my clients.

I want to make it clear.

I don't come from a specific industry, but I have worked within dozens of industry.

So I bring a very broad perspective of what I'm going to talk about today.

It's not about one company, one industry, one channel, but the consolidation of that industry information that I've gleaned over the years.

Here's number one: every journey is a battleground.

Every journey and every enterprise, is searching for the equation of how to impact the transactions between your customer and whatever product or service you're offering.

Let me make a distinguishing characteristic.

Everybody in the world is what I refer to, this as suspect.

When a suspect says, I'm interested in what you do or what you sell, they become a prospect, and when the prospect says, I'm going to try, I'm going to buy, they become a customer.

And when the customer repeats purchases, they become a client.

So the journey itself, it's a management tool, right?

It's a management tool that creates a framework that enables you to measure, monitor, track, and create a roadmap to align your organization with your customers.

Scopes.

Let me say that again.

You're in alignment with your customer's goals, not forcing the customer to be in alignment with yours because the customers have a voice and the customers don't get forced into that anymore.

I said it before I will say it over and over.

They expect businesses to provide relevant personalized experiences driven by there, preferences and Zehr recent interactions.

And so over the years, many of my clients asked me to write it down. So I created a book.

The book is called Dating Your Customer.

I only bring this up because there are dozens and dozens of great books on customer service.

And many times they insights within those customer service books can be the tipping point, the pivot of how you and your business interact.

So very quickly, my point is dating your customer, and that's very simple. Dating means dazzled.

Anticipate.

Treat them the way you want to be treated, or, more importantly, how they expect to be treated.

Be innovative in your solutions.

Nurture the relationship, and be grateful for everything that you want them to do and understand.

Organizations that are fast and intelligently accelerate these efforts of what I call dating.

And let's not go there with some of the other day things that we've heard in the past few years. This is really very focused on business and not social interactions, or misappropriate social interactions.

These are appropriate business interactions.

Companies need to adjust as we come out of the pandemic to what we're Callie, the new normal. I don't think it's the new normal.

I don't think we're ever going to return to normal what as a placeholder. Let's just call it the New normal.

So in my journey with all of my clients, I really came up with five questions: What is the customer experience?

What is the importance of your customer experience?

How do we measure that customer's experience?

What do we do to understand what that customer is going to do?

And what is the management of making that customer experience? Great!

Now I want to manage your expectations.

During this presentation, there's not going to be any polls.

And we're going to keep all the questions to the end. Why? Because I want to keep the flow glowing.

I want to keep the flow interactive from mice, information to yours.

And I try to do that with engaging pictures in, and things that you can kind of relate to, rather than fancy charts and graphs and, and things that look like I'm coming out of.

A PHD. Dissertation on data analytics. It's, it's really simple.

Every customer, every customer, is out there.

And everyone that is a customer can be positively impact.

You want to understand the bottlenecks, that's what the data is all about.

You want to look at the analytics to improve the customer experience.

You want to understand.

that's a journey based on, what's in it, for me can increase customer satisfaction, And if the customer is not satisfied, they will go find someone who will satisfy them.

It's that simple.

Now, there are situations where you say, well, there isn't a substitute for an instance.

If you're an Apple or a Mac user, there isn't a substitute.

And I'll talk about what I believe has been a relevant deterioration in the Apple approach to great customer service.

I had the good fortune of working with Steve Jobs directly.

and he micromanaged every detail.

But those details today have turned into a monolith of you're going to do it our way or you're not going to get it at all.

I'll give you a quick, for instance, I'm a loyal Apple customer.

I needed a new computer because they had come out with an M one chip, I ordered a brand-new computer with an M one chip only to find out that there were no M one chip computers in the United States due to Kobe. So I had to order it overseas.

When did it arrived?

It was the older version, not the M one chip.

Well, that should be a simple replacement, correct?

Appo put me through, so many bells and whistles so many hoops to send back their mistake.

Then if I'd had a choice, which I didn't, I wouldn't walk away.

So I finally got someone to say, The only way we're going to be able to do this is for you to order and new M one computer.

We will send you the new M one computer and then we'll issue you a return authorization to send back the older version and give you credit.

I'm not exaggerating when I tell you it took six weeks to accomplish that, including the fact that it took so long.

Apple wanted to give me a partial credit for returning it because I had it over 14 days.

Now, to me, their satisfaction was not even the minimum requirement.

You don't want satisfied customers.

Steve Jobs said, and I totally agree.

You want loyal customers, and that's our goal here today.

The State of customer service has changed dramatically as we move through cope, customer service is on price, par.

It used to be if you lowered the price, people would do business with you.

The truth of the matter is that a recent survey from The Wall Street Journal said people will pay 17% more if they get great customer service.

Wow, customer service helps impact your bottom line.

So it's relevant because it drives profitability.

If you could find something that drove profitability and impact at 17%, you jump on it.

But yet, from my perspective, it's a customer service advisor.

It's a customer journey.

Analytics, advocates.

I have found, you either see great customer service, or bad customer service in the middle of the road, has gone away.

That's very sad, It's a shift that I don't think benefits business.

Customers may ignore attention.

They may not like it, but there's customers that need demand attention because they want it.

But at the end of the day, satisfaction is not the perfect objective.

It isn't.

The customer has discovered they have a voice, and they are the king of the jungle.

They understand that they can roar.

And more importantly, they now understand that bacon, Rohr on social media and get even.

So it's no longer the customer, against the big company.

It's the customer with millions and millions of potential viewers and followers.

It start to impact the trajectory of how that company is perceived.

And we can spend a lot of time talking about great examples, lousy examples.

Let's take an easy 100.

Is it the best car in the world? No.

But talk to somebody that owns a Honda, and you have a loyal customer.

They will talk about the price back.

They will talk about the service.

They will talk about the car The same way people talk about Apple products. That's right. Apple products.

To me, Apple products are part of your lifestyle, or PCs and Android and others have not adapted that loyalty factor.

They're much more transactional, rather than transformative.

You want your product or service to be transformed.

People want the product of the products.

Not the product itself.

So we need to measure and optimize this journey and in doing so, you start to magnify and analyze all those data points that we were talking about.

We know there's thousands of data points. I'm not surprised.

Customers don't care.

Customers are pretty much willing to take a short survey. I got a survey yesterday from Walgreens.

I'm a Walgreens customer.

Happy to fill out the survey.

The first thing it said was, this will take you 15 to 30 minutes to fill out What's in it?

four.

There was no incentive. There was no inducement.

I would be put into a random draw where I could get $100 gift card.

I immediately assume there's $1100 gift card and thousands of people responded why do I want to waste my time?

I look at lotteries $367 million for one winter.

Why don't they change that to 365 winners?

And each one wins a million dollars that changes the odds and gives me more of an inducement.

to want to play.

Because it goes back to the what's in it for me it's very simple.

Customers want what convenience speed resolution and they don't want to spend a whole lot of time having to do tests.

Using the right metric at the right point is very simple.

It's real-time overtime.

Now, as I started to work with all these companies, I started to recognize, what I referred to was, the first contact resolution, that's very much like outerspace.

You take the number of resolved incidents on the first contact by the total number of incidents, and you come up with a number.

Then numbers, starts to tell you how quickly you can resolve a customer's issue, and I'm gonna give you the secret to that at the end of the presentation, it's worth millions of dollars to large corporations. It is the secret sauce, it's the behind the green curve.

Stick around, I think you'll like it.

There's such a thing as, it's an unanswered chat, how many times have you gone online and been put on hold?

How many times you've been gone on hold, and then transferred, or the call gets dropped?

Or the waiting time is very long. I called the phone company the other day.

Your wait time will be 30 minutes, I'm sorry.

Sure, yeah, the phone company.

Put more people on the line, You have no excuse.

The excuse is that, in many cases, companies are outsourcing, They have limited resources, limited staff, but you're the phone company.

If you're the phone company, it's not excuse to say, I'm going to keep you on hold for 30 minutes, but they've come up with a solution. Some of the Some of them not.

If you do not want to wait, press one, you will be put into the queue. You will not lose your spot in line. And we will call you back within 30 minutes.

Now you go about your business and they call you back.

I can tell you that every time I do that I start my watch to check to see if they are in fact calling me back in 30 minutes.

And if they call me back at less than 30 minutes.

Amex that, and if it's over 30 minutes, I'm unhappy.

So let's talk about but customer service map.

It's about putting yourself in the shoes of your customer.

Trying to understand the path or the process they follow until they get what they want from your business. What do I call it? WI FM, what's in it for me?

What's in it for me? Not you, not the company.

Me.

The idea is to find the perfect way to offer a seamless customer journey so that they go from start to finish easily.

Now, the mapping includes awareness, search, reputation, conversion, and experience.

This is a little different, it's, well, let me say this.

It's the mapping.

It's the external viewpoint, meaning the customer and the service map is the internal Am I making sense?

two separate maps.

one from the perspective of the customer.

one. From the perspective of the company itself.

So, customer journey mapping.

Again, it's putting you in the shoes of the customer.

Not how you deal with it. from an internal perspective.

The idea is to find out more about the customer, what they're going through and why they're going through it.

So, I think that there are seven journeys.

and this morning, one of the other speakers did a very nice overview of customer journeys, But I'm going to break it down into a more granular state.

Your customer's journey begins long before they're accustomed.

What did I say before?

The customer journeys aren't created?

They're discovered to meet internal goals.

Customers must actually become a customer, but remember, their process starts long before they're a customer. They talk to their friends. They read reports. They look at consumer reports. They look at social media. They looking at Yelp reviews.

They talk to other people long before you even know they're out there.

Recent study.

74% of all people are likely to switch if they find the processing of trying to do business to be too difficult, too time consuming, too cumbersome.

You've got to make it easy for them to buy and joked.

Then there's the onboarding, the onboarding is the part of your business that could have a major impact on both retention.

And Robin, it's, like I said before, if it takes me too much time, if there's too many hurdles, what's your blood type, When were you born, where were you born, what color is your hair, what color are your eyes, what's your favorite fruit, What's the name of your dog?

What does this got to do with me buying electricity for my own?

Nothing.

But, they're trying to get information from me.

way too early in our relationship.

It doesn't show me the what's in it for me and why I should tolerate it.

I'm not a big fan of the way banking has morphed.

64% of all banks have reported it that they've lost revenue because of their current onboarding journeys.

Do you have a friendly neighborhood bank?

Can you remember when you went into a bank and they knew your name?

Can you remember when they gave you a cup of coffee or a free pen or or chatted with you about your business goals, your financial plans? I can't remember having that happened late.

Journaling, journaling.

The setup in a bank.

It's a difficult process. Why?

Because it's money laundering.

It's it's all kinds of issues that have changed the dynamics of the bank, I get that, but you don't have your friendly neighborhood bank awww unless you have a lot of money in the bank.

And typically, that's seven figures, and then you get a personal banker, and somebody knows your name and somebody who buy you. Coffee.

But, what about the rest of the population that doesn't have seven pictures?

They look at a bank as a place to deposit money, so they can pay their bills, and when it comes time to want a loan or some advice, they often go elsewhere.

Because, the bank hasn't developed the number one reason people do business, and it's called trust, More business is done based on trust, then trice, or anything else.

So, now, you come up with the pager.

How do I pay back? Let's say I'm signed up for my electric company or my cable, Is there a way I can automates the payments?

Is it easy? Is it seamless?

Do I have to go in and do it online every single time? Do I have to remember my password?

Can I make this seamless? You're delivering the product or service. I'm going to pay you, and we're done.

If you make that difficult, unpaid bills or late payments affect your cash flow.

And more importantly, your system starts sending out letters of demand to the customers who get annoyed, because all they really wanted to do, was figure out an easy way to pay.

So the pay journey is something to look at, and consider, because delivering a seamless, SLO effort payment experience is essential.

Now they use Germany.

What are we doing? How are we using it as setup prescription or we're transferring funds? Are we watching Netflix or HBO or or or or some other service?

Engaging with your organization in using your product and service heavily affects the metrics.

The easier you make it the better.

14 day free trial.

But then they want your credit card, because at the end of the 14 days, they're automatically going to start charging it.

Here's a simple tip.

I have no objection to giving you the information, but I'd, like a reminder, on the 14th day, you're going to start charging.

Well, why don't all companies do that? Because they're afraid.

If they remind you, you won't continue.

If they're really that concerned that you won't continue, then they should use that information to try to change.

They use, and the operation, and learn why people don't want to pay after 14 days.

There's the support, and here's where the rubber meets the road.

When encountering issues, they're frustrated.

The customer gets a customer's upset. The customer says, this is the critical moment of truth.

It's the critical moment on how you're going to service your customer who believes they have a legitimate concern complaint, or may even want to quit.

Senate before I will say it again.

Custer's will pay 17% more from a company with a great reputation for service.

Is that you?

And then there's the shift happens.

It happens to all of us downsizing, moving new kids, kids, moving out, losing my hair, whatever.

There are things that take place as the natural course of events.

These journeys are spurred by shift happening.

And the greatest shift that we've seen occurred in the last 15, 18 months, and we're not out of it yet.

The good news is everyone was impacted.

The bad news is, everybody was impact.

The good news is it sets up a level playing field.

You can now start to refine your customer journey based on the new analytics and data that you've collected for the W I F M.

What's in it for me?

Ladies and gents, we all understand what great customer service looks like. Sounds like it feels like.

Why aren't we delivering?

It's the golden rule. Do unto others.

If it's do unto others, it should be changed to do for others.

The more you align with my goals, as your customer, My objectives, as your customer.

The longer I'm gonna stay with you, because I don't want to go through the, By this, setup, the page, Ernie, the use journey, and move on to someone else. I'd rather stay with you.

So, use a complaint as an opportunity to keep your customer.

It's really that simple.

And then, there is, unfortunately, the lead jerk.

And the lead journey is what they call the churn. In some industries, that's 25%.

That's huge.

Even a small churn can impact your bottom line. Because those are the people that their incremental sales typically deliver, the largest profits, because you've covered all your fixed expenses.

So, each additional person, each additional subscription, each additional transaction, typically is more profitable than the early ones.

You want to make it easy.

You want to make it simple.

Your customers will remember the effort required to cut the cord, and the companies that make the journey easy, and perhaps even return because they've gone elsewhere and found it was very difficult to do business with them.

Every enterprise wants to deliver this journey map.

It's another pictorial of what it looks like.

Here's what we got, guys.

They start, They look, they make a decision, they have an experience, they develop loyalty or not.

If the loyalty is not developed, they leave the market that Margaret triggers another start, of the journey, to bright ideas, the acquisition to the new supplier, and the initial brain consideration, the evaluation starts those journeys all over again: It's about putting yourself in the shoes of your customer to understand the path or process that they take.

You want to orchestrate corrective actions when need.

You want to understand that it's experience, engagement, and data driven, correct?

But the journey mapping, the journey orchestration in the journey analytics are all based on the customer's perception and not yours.

You just respond to them.

You track the journey using the scores.

You pivot.

You change, you alter your trajectory for your customer.

You prioritize the underperforming journey for the investments, and you continue to go back to the customer journey management mapping.

And you refine it on a constant basis.

It's really simple.

Orchestrate, track and prioritize.

Orchestrate, track and prioritize.

Once you do that, you fill the pipeline, you establish a direct link between the customer and the metrics and you do the analysis, the modeling and the orchestration, as I've said before.

Here's another way to look at, They're aware they find you, they look at your reputation, they convert, they do business with.

You want to monitor that performance. You want to identify how you can monetize and replicate it.

You want to understand the impact and you want to understand how that impacts your TPS.

It's not that difficult, that data is out there.

You want to deliver lots and lots of logs.

Here it is.
33:06
What I promised you, are you ready?

You cannot forecast what the customer thinks or wants, you cannot know everything or guess.

what you can say to them.

What is it that you would like for me to do to make you happy and to make you a loyal customer.

There it is, the secret sauce to everything.

What will make you happy for your W I I ask them.

I'm going to give you some templates in the handouts. They're very simple.

You can see how easy it is to fill in, and I want you to monitor your results, because, ladies and gentlemen, at the end of the day, you provide solutions, You create bajau, and you engage with your customers.

You are problems, who charge for you is.

It's time to start your customer journey, and to understand how to deliver the W II FM.

Let's get started.

I'm open to questions, James.

Fantastic presentation, Apologize for the technical issues, but man, you really, to let her thank you so much, I love ....

Fantastic. Ilana.

So, we do have a couple of questions, August. one question we are running over, but for you for, because we ran over was certainly going to.

Uh, so there's one question for you.

The person said I had experience with training organization that was horrific customer service, then even seem to be hiding criminal activity.

This can make you as a customer feel extremely devalued, disrespected and turned off, terrible when your experience first as a customer trying to positively project the training organization only to be slapped in the face by the enemy because of their ops officers creation, suspicious activity.

So any comments on that experience?

Well, you've got two outs. You go back to your credit card company, 'cause I assume that's how you paid for them.

And you leverage that to get your money back and do not be bashful.

If you believe that they have done something that that was that onerous and that heinous, sometimes your credit card company will go to bathroom.

The second thing, is you've got social media.

Be very careful what you post on social media.

You don't want to subject yourself to litigation.

But, as long as it's factual, social media has an amazing effect on how quickly people will respond. So I would go back to them and say, here's what I'm going to do. Do you really want me to do that? Give me my money back and let me just go on my way.

Great. Great response.

Thank you, James, from Chicago. Wow! What a great presentation words can express.

How interesting that presentation was one of the best i-well, you're seven journeys, as I mentioned.

So thank you again, any parting words, Jains.

Just remember, customer journeys aren't created.

They are discovered understand how to exceed their expectations for the WI.

I F M and strive for loyalty, not just satisfaction, when you kissed your wife or your husband goodby today and she said, I was satisfied. Did that make you feel good?

Nice. Nice, James. Great way to end it. Thank you so much and have a great day for sure.

All right?

So at the top of the hour, hopefully, with no technical problems, we'll kick it off with middle of Nowhere for Vic.

For Jacksonville, Florida perform Presidio customer experience, excellent slide, on how to create positive customer experience, with chat and voice bots, leveraging intelligent automation.

Thank you, and We'll see you at the top of the hour.

About the Author

James Feldman,
The Bright Idea Guy,
Shift Happens.

James Feldman is a globally recognized business advisor, mentor, innovation Sherpa, author, speaker, and serial entrepreneur, who has guided hundreds of companies and thousands of individuals around the world towards optimum performance levels. He advises companies on building strong customer-concentric, innovative organizations that deliver transformational growth to achieve goals, overcome challenges, and think ‘inside the box’ to solve problems.

The robust result of his real-world information is that attendees become more enlightened to influence their behavior and competitive differentiation. He delivers a strong, entertaining, thought-provoking presentation that will demonstrate 'shifts’ based on a series of interrelated actions with a focus on obsessive intimacy and attendee engagement.

James delivers proven real-world strategies that target and transform challenges into opportunities! It’s about how to think, not what to think. Leveraging extensive experience developing and implementing effective strategies to drive business improvements for both non-and for-profit organizations, Utilizing licensed movie and television scenes attendees will be simultaneously entertained and educated.

His presentation is applicable to brand development, hospitality innovation, business transformation, leadership development, creative problem solving, new business development, B2B/B2C marketing, innovative problem solving and strategic planning.

Throughout his executive career, he founded several performance improvement companies. He has been responsible for facilitating Toyota’s launch of new products, spearheading the introduction of breakfast at McDonald’s, raising $450M for the Y-ME Breast Cancer Organization, and improving Hewlett-Packards go-to-market strategies. James’ clients have included leading organizations such as AT&T, Carnival Cruise Lines, Apple, Verizon, US Department of Defense, Hyatt, Walt Disney, Ritz Carlton, Microsoft, MGM Casinos and Resorts, MGM, Walt Disney, American Dairy Association, Cremation Association of N.A. Ford, the March of Dimes, and the American Dental Association.

A highly respected Thought Leader he is the author of several books. They include "D-A-T-I-N-G Your Customer®," "Shift Happens!®",  “Thriving on Change in Organizations” and “Celebrate Customer Service – Insider Secrets,” and has written for publications including Adweek, Advertising Age, Investors Business Daily, and Business Travel News. Named one of the Most Innovative People in the 21st Century by Incentive Magazine.

James has earned more professional certifications than almost any other speaker including Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), Certified Incentive and Travel Expert (CITE), Certified Professional of Incentive Marketing (CPIM), Certified Performance Technologist (CPT), Master Incentive Professional (MIP), Platform Certified Speaker (PCS), Certified Underwater Photography Instructor, Private Pilot, and Artisan Chocolatier.