Invisible Brand

Planning Director Chris Bromiley has specialised in mapping, analysing and refining customer journeys for fifteen years. Now he's sharing the key points he's learned about how this approach builds better businesses.

Remember the heyday of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) bubble, five years or so ago? A perfectly simple and sensible idea – about managing customer relationships in a planned and consistent way – degenerated into total madness, with firms signing up to huge IT commitments without any real idea at all of what they would get for their money.

Sorry if that brings back painful memories. But I mention it because I’m feeling just a little concerned that my own specialist subject – Customer Journey – might be showing the first signs of going the same way. We’ve reached the point now where it seems everyone’s talking about it – marketing, sales, IT, operations, top management, big consultancies, small consultancies, agencies of all shapes and sizes. Many seem to have already journeyed a long, long way from the customer. Under the Customer Journey label, I’ve witnessed proposals for mammoth change programmes, walls filled with process wiring diagrams and interminable PowerPoint presentations which should have their own carbon footprint warning.

Frighteningly, it’s turning into a Big Idea. And Big Ideas mean Big projects + Big spends + Big timescales. And that means Big Delays before there’s any real benefit. If ever. From my perspective, with 15 years behind me as a Customer Journey disciple, I am very uncomfortable indeed with this. Because provided all concerned can keep a sense of proportion, I know there can in fact be a huge amount to be gained very quickly - without having to place extra demands on your IT department, nor clogging up your change management unit.

Let me explain...

What is the Customer Journey?

The simple, sensible idea at the heart of the whole subject is, in my view, the process of walking through the series of interactions that all of your customers have with your business, in order to:

1. understand and map all those interactions
2. identify and simply measure where you lose the big slugs of customers
3. understand the role of the brand in developing a customer relationship

The diagram below shows this process in outline, highlighting the importance of understanding where, when, why and how customers defect. Nothing more, nothing less.

How we improve bottom line performance and the customer experience

Tackling the customer journey from this perspective should reap substantive rewards in a matter of weeks not years.

Seven steps to realising the biggest, quickest benefits

So now for the bit you really want to read. “Go on Bromiley, show me the money”

1. Don’t get bogged down in meticulously detailing every process, communication or interaction. Deficiencies hide in the comfort of complexity. 80% is more than good enough.
2. Start with the big pieces of the jigsaw and get a shape to them. Concentrate your questions and investigations on the likeliest weak links. Get some of your best front-line people to tell you just what’s going wrong.
3. Have a small but multi-function team and set them tight deadlines and deliverables. A partnership between your team and a third party works best.
4. Get your agency to be the customer (best if it’s an agency with proven Customer Journey credentials – well, I needed to get a plug in somewhere). Brief them to go through your business challenging the brand experience that’s delivered by your marketing, call centres, website, branches etc. The agency needs to know where to look, and be confident enough to tell it how it is, warts and all.
5. Film customers talking to call centres, filling in forms, going on line – and then ask them to tell you how it is. This is powerful stuff around the boardroom if you need to convince anybody just what it’s like to be a customer.
6. Use a simple sales funnel model to identify where you lose customers and map the communications at those points where you’re losing customers big time.
7. Focusing on your communications, ask “OK, what brand delivery do we need to halve the numbers of customers we lose at this point and that point?” It’s amazing just what can be achieved when the project is focused on fixing the problem in weeks.

So what have I learnt and what would I be looking to deliver?

Let’s look at some figures and accumulated knowledge…

• Your customers typically have 4 other similar connections - if you’re not in their top 2 you’re not in the game
• Customers need 3 positive experiences to complete a purchase but only 1 to defect
• Customers are now far more likely to try a new entrant (or new ways of purchasing) than to go to the ‘old guard’
• Aligning marketing, sales and operations can deliver sales improvements of 20% or more
• 21% of sales are lost because customers do not understand the next stage
• 17% of sales are lost because products are not explained in customer benefit terms
• 35% of new business can come from satisfied customers (recommendations and referrals)

Understand the power of brand delivery. It’s the thing that customers experience which cements or destroys their relationship with you.

Remember they hold the relationship dice not you. So:

Get your organisation to think hard about how it delivers the brand experience.

Get your brand to come alive and be seen as innovative across all your channels

Align your core customer communications to the customer journey

Think and behave as a customer

Trawl your customer complaints – they’re probably telling you where you’re getting it wrong

I know that the majority of businesses could see improvements of 5% within weeks and certainly 10% improvement within 6 months. Why not set a target of 20% improvement within 12 months?

So are those numbers BIG enough and quick enough to get in touch?

Chris Bromiley would be delighted to share with you his experiences of the 80 odd Customer Journey projects he’s been involved with. He’s spent the last 15 years working within both agencies and clients delivering Customer Journey benefits within weeks not years. He’s seen it from both sides.