Customer Journey is a key player in any business’s success or failure. If your customers are not happy, customer retention will be harder, you will keep losing customers, no matter how hard you are working at your marketing activities. And if you are unable to sustain your existing customers your growth will be compromised. Your marketing expense will increase and your brand identity and reputation would decline which could have a devastating impact in the long term. The performance management system is a very powerful tool for businesses to ensure success and steady growth. Obviously, the performance of an organization can easily be measured by its growth and customer satisfaction. But it is not as simple either. In reality, a business’s performance is the performance of all their departments, finance and revenue, operational cost, production cost, support and other costs, profits, sales and customer satisfaction. Even if all is flawless but the customer journey is not so good and the customers are not happy, this could potentially negate all your efforts in all other manners.
The customer journey is the steps and activities that a business requires them to do from the first introduction till the sale and even after-sale services and support are also included. This is what a customer journey is. Whether you are in the production business, services business or any industry you should have customers and if you have customers there would be a purchase cycle too. The customer journey is the entire customer interaction with a brand from day one till today that includes the purchase and after-sales support, and everything else. Customer satisfaction is the key to a good brand reputation and improved conversion rates, and that all completely depends on the customer journey.
When talking about the customer journey it doesn’t only means the performance of the employees who are dealing with the customers, but it also includes all the IT and infrastructure that provides a full environment where your customers interact with your brand. Every business does its best to improve its service delivery methods, customer experience and customer journey. The businesses deploy new systems, train their staff, do marketing and install so many technologies just to improve customer experience and customer journey. But how would you know if all your efforts are paying off or not? The performance management system will tell you what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong, where you can improve things and what things are helping out in improving the customer journey.
How performance management system helps in customer journey improvements:
Measure Service Delivery Time
Service Delivery time is very important in customer experience and customer journey. The entire service delivery time from entering the branch till getting the service is the service delivery time. It can be reduced by many methods and technological solutions. For example, a digital queue management system can significantly improve (reduce) the service delivery time. Not only that the business can also measure how much on average a customer has to wait to get a service done. Then they can take steps to improve that and even steps can be taken to make the environment of the waiting area better for the customer which will improve their experience and satisfaction level. The average time taken by a server to deliver a particular service can also be measured with a performance management system which helps businesses understanding a lot of details.
See More: Benefits of Queue Management using Mobile Apps
Measure Average Customer Wait Time
The customer wait time is a very critical factor in the customer journey. The wait time starts from the time a customer dispenses a ticket for the queue or sign-up for the queue till they reached the counter/server. It is important to track this parameter. No one likes waiting, a long wait time could annoy your customers and visitors. It is very critical to take steps to reduce the wait time. Only the average wait time is not enough to completely understand and identify the areas of improvements. It is important to understand the average wait time on different days of the week or month or different hours of a day. As some hours are the busiest hours, some days are busier than the others and so on and so forth. If you are offering multiple services, then measure the wait time for each service, try to get as much detailed data as possible. This will make it easier to understand the process which will help you to improve the customer journey.
See More: 5 Tricks to Quickly Serve Customers Using Queuing System
Measure Customer Effort Score
Customer effort score is to understand the difficulties a customer face at multiple touchpoints during the entire customer journey. It is very hard to define a generic definition for these touchpoints as they are completely different for each case. Even businesses offering similar products and services could also have a completely different customer journey. A unique experience is what increases customer retention and customer satisfaction. Anyway, the customer effort score can be calculated by the time it requires to perform a certain task, how often customers are asking for help, and how often customers are complaining about anything will identify those touchpoints which require changes to improve the customer journey.
For example, for a customer service centre, a customer is coming to the branch, then they generate a queue ticket from the kiosk, and then wait in the waiting area and at the end they get the service done. The business could measure the average time taken by a customer to operate the kiosk to generate the ticket. How often customers are missing their turns due to poor audio-visual announcements. Sometimes the screens and speakers installed in certain areas and in other areas either the screens are not much visible or the sound couldn’t reach during the busy hours or so. Even if you are offering an online interaction, you can measure the time spent on different steps and especially those steps from where most of the customers are leaving your website needs special attention. These things will help to identify and measure the customer efforts score. The data can be used to improve those steps and touchpoints to improve the customer journey.
See More: 5 Challenges and Solutions of Queue Management System in Banks
Measure Walkaways and Customer Churn
It is very important to measure the walkaways and customer churn rate. The walkaways are the customer who happened to visit the branch get the ticket and signed up for the queue but left without getting the service. The customer churn rate is also a similar kind of KPI, the difference is that it measures the number of customers who left the brand or cancel their orders or subscriptions or purchases and it is measured for a given value of time. It is easy to set up those KPIs in a performance management system and businesses can get an excellent understanding of the reasons that are causing them to lose business. Additional data can also be gathered by requesting customers for their feedback or by inquiring them why they are leaving. This further help businesses to improve their customer journey to reduce the walkaways and customer churn rates.
See More: How Queue Management System can benefit in shipping industry?
Measure Employee Performance
Employee performance is very crucial to improve the customer journey. Proper monitoring, KPIs and OKRs could help to boost employee performance and let businesses understand the needs of training programs and other improvements. Which could further increase employee performance. For example, if an employee is taking too much time comparing to other employees to serve customers, then there must be something wrong. Either he/she is not trained well, or they are not motivated enough. The Performance Management System could help businesses to identify such employees and then the management can take adequate actions to resolve the problem. Most of the time it is either poor training or higher workloads which cause an employee to lag in performance. All issues are rectifiable, but the first step is to identify the issue. Boost in employees’ performance could hugely impact the customer journey.
See More: Queue System working in Government Departments
Monitor Support Request
Customers always require support, whether it is pre-sale or post-sale support. Business should have to provide excellent support to the customers. As all of your products are services have definitive support types and possible enquiries, it is easier to enlist them all and ask your support team to mark each support ticket with those categories. Then carefully monitor the time your support team is taking to provide against each support ticket. Measure the average value, measure employee performance and overall departmental performance. This way you could easily identify which types or categories of supports are harming your customer relations and what can be done to improve them. It is better to ask your customers for their feedback and analyze those feedbacks too. This way business can further improve their customer experience and customer journey with the help of a performance management system. This also helps to improve the products and services.
See More: How Queue Management System Helps to Provide Better Customer Service
Measure Complaint Resolution Time and Quality
Complaints are a very crucial part of a customer journey. If complaints remain unsolved it could literally ruin your relationship with your customers. It is very critical to measure the complaint resolution time. Categorize different complaints and measure the resolution time against each category. It is extremely important that your customers are satisfied at the end of each complaint resolution. These KPIs also help you understand the employee performance and then you can take steps to improve employee performance by more training and motivation or new recruitments. One thing is important to understand that each customer wants a personalized experience from their brand. Only good training programs can make your team able to resolve the complaints effectively. Whether they are technical complaints or general complaints, each complaint means a business could potentially lose a customer. It is very important to measure the performance of your service and support teams with a professional performance management system and then take steps to further improve the customer journey and customer experience.
See More: 10 Reasons to Choose RSI Queue Management System over Other Similar Products
Measure the Performance of Digital Interactions
Digital is now an integral part of our society especially the metropolitans like Dubai and other emirates of UAE are very advance societies. The expectations of the customers are high the competition is tough hence the businesses have to be very vigilant to sustain customers and build a positive reputation. Which is only possible with a great customer journey. These days a customer journey not only starts from entering into the branch or outlet, but the online interaction is also very important. People love to talk on social media platforms, brands often use them to communicate with their customers and larger audiences. Especially measure how much time it usually takes your team to respond to customer’s email or social media queries and everything else.
It is important to build a good brand presence and positive brand image in the digital world. Businesses are spending very huge chunks of their hard earnings on digital channels. Whether it is social media, online marketing or online customer portals. All could be very helpful in customer retention and generating new leads. It is important to measure the effectiveness of your digital efforts with the specialized KPIs and OKRs. A performance management system helps to measure the performance of your website or the performance of your social media team or digital marketing efforts or anything that is enabling interaction with your customers in the digital world. Take discrete steps to improve your digital communication with your customers and the digital platforms which allow interaction with your customers. This will enable you to understand and improve the digital customer journey.
See More: What are the Benefits of Improving Customer Journey?
Conclusion
A Performance Management System can help businesses a lot in streamlining their processes, resources and business practices. The business can easily identify the areas of improvement and then effectively focus their efforts and resources in those directions to improve the customer journey and customer experience to improve brand reputation, customer retention and customer satisfaction which in long term ensures steady growth and increased sales and revenue. The performance management system is not only capable of measuring the performance of different processes and operational activities but it can effectively measure the performance of the entire enterprise including internal departments, teams, and individual employees. The performance management system can easily measure and monitor the customer journey and various steps and processes along with employees and staff and all other factors that are responsible for forming the entire customer journey and customer experience. This is very helpful in understanding and identifying the areas of improvements. Business can easily take steps and build up their strategies to improve the customer journey on the basis of the data collected and generated by the performance management system.
RSI Concepts is providing a complete customized solution for Performance Management Systems, KPI Systems and OKR Systems. Our tailor-made solutions are most efficient and more cost-effective. The personalized software interfaces make it a lot easier to operate and extract actionable reports. Feel free to reach us out via our Contact Us page if you have an enquiry or want to know more.
Check this out: How a KPI Software can help provide better Customer Journey?