Retain Customers Through End to End Customer Experience

End to end customer experience is the set of interactions between customers and an organization throughout the duration of their relationship.

Usually, it encompasses three elements:

1. The customer’s points of contact with the brand (moments of truth)
2. The Customer Journey
3. And the environments in which the first 2 take place

The sum of all these factors creates the customer’s experience of contact with your company from start to finish.

This is called end to end customer experience.

In this post, let’s look at each of these elements and how they influence buyer and loyalty dynamics. That way, your company can model these processes according to the true needs and desires of customers.

The 3 elements of end to end customer experience

1- Customer contact points

These are all the critical moments when customers interact with the organization.

These include its brand, products or services, advertisements, websites, social media, offers, etc.

They happen from when they find out about the brand through to the decision to buy, and even after.

We call these times ‘moments of truth’. It’s during these times that the customer experience occurs in the most striking and effective way for the client.

Imagine two competing restaurants that are close to each other and have wonderful options, delicious food, great customer service and a nice atmosphere.

The two have a huge queue waiting at the door, waiting on the sidewalk to enter.

However, one of them provides street performers, such as mimes and magicians, to distract customers while they wait.

The other did not have the same concern.

This example makes the importance of these two key points of end to end customer experience very clear:

Be attentive to the process as a whole:

That is, even before entering the establishment and placing their order, there has already been a customer contact point with your company. And one of the restaurants already makes the customer experience much more enjoyable, because they realized this situation and took action.

Focus on experience, not product:

Adding intangible values to the dishes, service and restaurant atmosphere at other points of contact, such as during waiting, making the restaurant more picturesque and enjoyable, are competitive advantages that you should explore.

Check out this video that’s been successful on the internet, showing a real case, like the example from above:

2- The Customer Journey

The Customer Journey is one of the oldest marketing concepts.

It encompasses every path traveled by a customer from the moment he or she makes contact with your company until the purchase takes place and the subsequent period of loyalty.

According to an article from HBR, companies that know how to deal adequately with the client’s journey have several advantages over other businesses:

• Increased customer satisfaction
• Churn reduction
• Increased revenue
• Increased employee satisfaction
• They discover more effective ways of collaborating between roles and levels

For this to happen, you should view the importance of the customer’s journey in the context of the end to end customer experience as something that goes beyond simply optimizing processes to make them more enjoyable.

The most important thing is to develop a whole reformulation of the company culture, focused on the journey.

If you used to talk about a customer-focused culture rather than a product culture, the HBR article speaks of a culture focused on the client’s journey.

In this context, we can show five steps:

1. Understand that the client’s journey, in fact, is divided into several days
2. Find out which are the most important journeys for clients
3. Develop better processes for each of them
4. Spread these findings throughout the organization
5. Lastly, generate a culture focused on the continuous improvement of the client’s journey

The process is slow and labor intensive, but the benefits are enormous.

See also: How The Churn Rate Calculation Can Help Your Business

3- Customer Experience Environments

It is very common to divide this issue simplistically between virtual and physical environments, as if to limit the customer experience to only the internet and the point of sale.

From the moment a consumer leaves the house to go to a mall and faces the hell of congestion, then goes to his nephew’s party at a children’s buffet, and discovers that he’s delivered the wrong package, the customer passes through the most diverse shopping experience environments.

A case that illustrates how the customer experience environment may be completely different from what we imagine is one that involves Johnnie Walker in Brazil. When the laws for driving under the influence of alcohol became stricter, effectively reducing the acceptable limit of alcohol in the Blood to zero, there was a change in the customer experience environment.

So, by moving to the place of consumption (a bar) and returning home, Johnnie Walker’s customers had to get used to taxiing. They needed to abandon the comfortable environment of their own cars.

The response from Johnnie Walker was swift.

It teamed up with a taxi calling application, 99 Taxis, and started offering significant discounts on trips.

This made the costumer experience again enjoyable for its customers.

Check out this video [the audio is in Portuguese, but you can turn on the subtitles] talking about the excellent results of this particular campaign.

As you’ve seen, customer-focused, well-modeled processes can make all the difference.

Think about the end to end customer experience the next time you develop a customer service process flow.