Customer journey and customer profile

Who are our customers, what are they like and what do they want? Those are important questions for every company and business who are trying to be competitive and serve their customers well. One way to answer those questions is to compartmentalize your customer into main categories, profiles. It underlines the main characteristics of the customers dividing them into different customer profiles. You could have four customer profiles or dozens depending on your business. The aim in customer profiles is to identify what kind of customers use the company’s services so that it is possible to design services for specific customers.

How is it done? How can companies know what their customers are like? Companies have few tools to gather information about their clients. When a client buys from e-commerce, he or she gives a lot of basic information to that business. It is the same thing if you buy something from a store and you use your membership card or a discount card. Company can then analyse for example what type of customer buys Coca-Cola. But that is just basic data about the customer, where he or she lives and how old he or she is. It doesn’t give any answers to the questions: what the customer wants from our services and what are they like.

Here qualitative research comes in handy. Interviewing people is a great way to reveal a lot of important information about the customers and the current state of the offered service. Interviews can cover people from potential customers to staff of the business. When you have a wide view about the service and about different customer profiles, it is easy to design a service for your intended audience.

Let’s have an example. Even in this economy some people buy cars so let’s think about for example Volkswagen dealer. They have a widespread of different models that people buy from different reasons. Their customers also expect different kind of services. Some might be just browsing and they are not seriously considering on buying so they might look at the cars and leave. A different customer is a serious buyer and wants to take the car to a test drive and the third customer is a person who wants to have a meaningful conversation about the mechanics of the car with the salesperson. These customer profiles are very diverse from each other and the company has to take that into a count. The company might focus on one important customer profile so that their needs and demands are met, or they could design services for all of the profiles or a few of them. Either way it is always important to know your customer.

http://www.andertoons.com/car/cartoon/3220/i-like-it-but-im-looking-for-more-of-status-symbol-any-way-you-can-double-price

One way to understand your customer is to make a customer’s journey map. It is a representation of a customer’s trip to use a specific service. Journey map basically breaks customer experience into small pieces. It shows step by step what the customer goes through in order use your service. It has a starting point and an end, both which you determine however you like. For example the journey could start from having a need and it ends when the need is fulfilled. When you are doing a customer journey map, you should always ask yourself what happens next. It is as simple as that.

A great thing in journey maps is that, when you break down the path you can design specifically for one moment in that path. For example if the customer has to walk across a busy street in order to use your services, what can you do to ease the access to your business? Maybe you can’t do anything but without the journey map, you might not even know that there was such a problem.

Below is an example of a journey map, where a customer buys a mobile phone.

http://customerexperienceplanning.com/2012/04/11/customer-journey-mapping-part-i-the-basics/

Sources:

Moritz, S. 2005. Service Design. Practical access to an evolving field.

http://vimeo.com/78554759

Solutions mean nothing if you are not solving the right problem

For countless times in work life and in school life, we have countered this problem. People are trying to solve a wrong problem. Perhaps they think that they know a lot about some area and they want to solve a problem regarding their strengths. Some might just start solving problems that they feel like solving or maybe they don’t really know what the problem is. This is all in vain if the right problem isn’t taken into consideration.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1998-10-13/

Everything should start from finding the right problem. That actually is the core of service design. Before you start solving any problem, take your time to define the right problem first. When you do that, solutions come fairly easily for most of the problems. As Albert Einstein once said, if he had an hour to save the world he would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute finding solutions.

Let’s think about a usual everyday problem for many people including me. How to wake up in the mornings, having slept well and feeling fresh? This is quite a common problem, am I right? I have been trying to figure out solutions for this problem for a long time. I have come up with solutions like counting sheep, going to bed early, trying to be as tired as possible so I would fall asleep quickly and so on. None of those have offered me a sustainable solution to wake up feeling fresh. Why is that? Most likely I have approached the whole thing from the wrong perspective. Perhaps I should have tried to define the right problem from the beginning. I have always just assumed that I know the problem, which is that I don’t know how to sleep well. That is most definitely true, but I could ponder that a bit deeper. Maybe the real problem is that I don’t relax early enough that my brain can go to sleep when the time is right. I am usually quite early in bed but it takes a long time to fall asleep. Even though I sleep roughly 8 to 9 hours a night, I often feel that I’m tired and I should get more sleep than I’m getting. That might also be the right problem that I should get more hours of sleep than on average, which is not happening at the moment.

It is generally acknowledge fact that we should have a regular sleeping pattern. Many people try to get rid of their sleep debt on weekends by waking up later and sleeping couple of hours more than on weekdays. Physicians typically don’t encourage us to that kind of behaviour. Altering our sleeping pattern on weekends can harm our weekdays’ dreaming. For some time now, I have practiced this method to get steady hours of dreaming every day of the week. It has worked to some extent and nowadays it is not that uncommon that I wake up feeling well rested.

Even though I have learnt to control my sleep pattern and I’m not as tired as I used to be, I might take a different approach to this problem. Perhaps the real problem is my attitude towards my sleep debt. I could change the way I think about those days that I feel tired by finding more positive things about those days. I tend to think that this must be a bad day now that I only slept 6 hours and I don’t get anything done because of sleep deprivation. Instead of thinking that way, I could focus on making the best out of that day and hoping to sleep better next time. 

Service Safari

Service safari is a practical method to research how customer service works in a real life situation. If you want to use this method all you need is a volunteer customer and a researcher. The researcher observes the whole customer experience and records it. Service safari can reveal some important information of your company’s customer service because the information is received from an authentic situation. Though in order to use this method you need to have permission from the customer and the service provider.

Let’s try this in practice.

My girlfriend Minna and I went to Amarillo to dine. I was the researcher so I observed our customer experience by taking notes and pictures. The first thing we noticed was that the atmosphere was quite cosy. Almost only lights they had were on the tables and otherwise the restaurant was pretty dark. Interior decorations were fairly classy and all in all it was a pleasant place to dine.

Restaurants customer service worked really well too. We were noticed very quickly as we came in and we were allowed to choose the table on our own. Once we sat to the table a waiter came promptly to us to ask what we would like to drink. She was very friendly and made us feel welcome to the restaurant. After she brought our drinks we had some time to think about our food choices. The waiter also helped us by recommending some dishes and we felt that she did her job very well. We would have ordered some starters but to our surprise we got free nachos right in the beginning so there was no need for any other starters which was nice. Food came quickly to our table and we were having a great time enjoying the atmosphere. Then we had a small problem. Minna’s food was too spicy for her even though she made sure that the food wasn’t supposed to be spicy at all. She discussed this matter with the waiter and she reacted to our problem very professionally. She said it would be all right if she wanted to switch her dish to something less spicy which was very nice of her. That was a huge relief and a great sign of good customer service and food was really good eventually. At the end of our dinner we asked to have the check. Although we couldn’t see the waiter who was serving us some other waiter brought the check to the table. She was as friendly and professional as the other one. The other waiter wished that we would have a nice day and that was a delightful ending for the dinner.

The whole experience was very pleasant and we would be happy use their services again. The customer service was superb and there was very little to complain about. Perhaps our waiter could have recommended some of their least spicy foods to Minna at the beginning but in the end we left the restaurant feeling truly positive. 

Customer service story

Today’s competitive markets it is very difficult to compete with only good products. There is always some other company that produces almost the same product as you so you really have to make a difference with customer service. Well executed customer service is the key to success these days because a happy customer equals money for the company. Even if that a customer wouldn’t buy a lot from the company he could still recommend their services to others if he had a pleasant customer experience. When a company does appreciate its customers and treats them well it usually improves the image of the company and that way attracts more paying customers. On the other hand one bad experience can overcome many good ones which means that companies can’t afford bad customer experiences.

Here is one example of my own customer experiences. This was little more on the negative side but it eventually ended happily.

It all started when my phone started playing tricks on me earlier this year. I started searching for information about new phones on the market and I actually spent roughly a month doing that which is weird I know. After reading all those phone reviews and watching countless videos on that subject I was pretty sure what phone I was going to buy. After I made the decision about which phone to buy I started looking for good deals from online. I picked out a store that had the lowest price and headed there the very next day.

So there I was at the store and the first thing I noticed was that the price was about 60 euros higher that it was supposed to be. It was disappointing to see that because I wasn’t willing to spend that much money on a cell phone. At that time the salesperson came to me and asked if I wanted help with something. I explained the situation about the price and he said that they have different prices than the website. He didn’t want to give me the phone at that lower price so I was ready to go home disappointed.

As I was walking away he quickly changed his mind and said that the price is no issue. It was a nice surprise that he was willing to give the discount after all. But when I came back he gave me a sales pitch about this other phone that he though was much better than the phone I wanted. It felt really odd because he had a customer who was ready to buy a phone and he didn’t want to sell it. It took some time to convince him that I really do know what I want and it’s not the phone he recommended. Finally he listened to me and agreed to sell me the right phone. Then he focused on extra sales and he was eager to sell me anything he could. He wanted to sell every accessory that they had for example screen protectors, cases, extra warranty and so on. I only bought screen protectors but he was very stubborn and he basically told me I was crazy for not having that extra warranty which was very expensive. Luckily for me he didn’t have anything else to sell me so I purchased my new phone and screen protectors and left the store.

This was not the best customer experience that I have ever had but in the end I walked out of there with the phone that I wanted in the first place. Some sales persons can be like that and you have to stand behind your own decisions or else you are going to buy something that you don’t want and need. It was a good lesson for me and nowadays I never buy anything without doing some research by myself.