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The Real Customer Journey Starts Where Yours Might Stop

Customer Journey frameworks popped like mushrooms after the rain sometime 5-7 years ago when it became clear what the real meaning of the expression – “The Customer is King” is and how dependent companies became on high customer satisfaction and great reviews.

Inside-Out versus Outside-in customer view and definition

Whilst there is nothing wrong with any of the existing frameworks, in the span of time, they all became hygiene factor and no longer a form of differentiation. You see, most of the companies look at the customer journey ‘Inside-Out’. They are trying to map customers to their own products, services and processes and perfect the touch-points. Nothing wrong with that, except, customers are human beings and as such their lives extend way beyond the realm of one company or another. The ‘Real Customer Journey’ is an ‘Outside-In’ perspective that follows the fluid customer’s day-to-day life, trying to map the company to the customer and not the other way around. Whether she or he is busy with the products or services of the company or not, almost does not matter. The real journey of the customer is where the customer is now, in real-time. Can you impact that ? Can you assist ? Can you be there directly or indirectly ? Successful companies are doing that and are using this perception to incite a ‘wow’ customer experience. Think Tesla. Think Waze. Think Google Maps. Think…

But, HOW does one go about the real customer journey ?

This is exactly what this talk is all about.

Looking at some eye-opening examples, we can observe a certain common denominator. Collection and analysis of data and a continues interpretation of it to determine in REAL-TIME the changing needs of customers, as oppose to static ones is key here. Transforming the software, solutions, products and services to incorporate the changing insights on the spot is also crucial. To that extent, some customer-focused companies are deploying new Artificial Intelligence tools and self-writing software in order to do exactly that. In addition, commercial and business collaboration with others that can be found along the real customer journey allows successful companies to just ‘be there’ at the right moment, way beyond the span of their existing products. And that is a source of a ‘wow customer experience’.

This keynote takes about 45 minutes. At the end, there is room for Q&A. The intention is to inspire people to look at their customers from the outside-in, to follow the fluid life of the customers and to design meaningful innovations that matter.