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The Importance of Smoothing the Customer Journey

A survey of 1,000 Australians suggests few companies provide customers with a satisfactory journey through their interactions. Eighty-four percent of surveyed consumers believe organisations provide a disconnected customer journey.

Understanding the customer journey, making it as smooth and intuitive as possible for the customer, and enabling the customer to choose the route of that journey as much as possible has become a priority for customer experience professionals.

Yet, it seems, few organisations are providing a landscape that enables customers to have a smooth and satisfying journey through their interactions.

The dangers of disruption and disconnectivity

MuleSoft, a company that bills itself as a provider of a platform for building application networks, surveyed more than 1,000 Australians to try and determine “whether organisations are meeting customer expectations for a connected, personalised experience.”

It surveyed customers across four industry sectors — banking, insurance, retail, government — and says: “Eighty four percent of Australian consumers believe that organisations in at least one of the four sectors surveyed provide a disconnected experience.”

“In private industries, a majority of Australian consumers said disconnected experience would make them consider changing to another service provider or vendor: banks – 61 percent; insurance – 67 percent; retailers – 67 percent.”

MuleSoft’s Asia Pacific VP, Will Bosma, said: “Australians are calling for on-demand experiences where their needs are met in minutes not days. The risks for organisations that fail to adapt are significant – more than 60 percent of Australians have considered changing a service provider due to a disconnected experience.”

He added: “While only a small percentage actually actioned this threat in the past 12 months, we can expect many more to act on their words if organisations do not act quickly to improve connectivity and personalisation.”

Don’t risk your customers’ loyalty

And at a time when customers are increasingly expecting immediate, or very rapid, fulfilment of their needs, the survey showed the challenges this creates for suppliers.

The survey reported: “A majority of Australian consumers believe opening a new bank account (88 percent) or applying for a credit card (76 percent) should be relatively instantaneous – taking under a day … [and] 25 percent of Australian consumers said they would like to apply for a loan in under an hour, and 50 percent want to be able to sign up to an insurance policy in the same timeframe.”

Bosma concluded: “Many organisations are feeling the pressure to start creating a connected customer journey, building a single view of the customer across all touchpoints and bringing a customer-centric view to everything they do.”

This, says IDC, “should concern those 38 percent of organisations that neither operate nor plan to operate CX networks.”

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