About customer journey management

By allowing customers to book an appointment, the journey can start before the customers physically visit you. This will create more efficient and personalized meetings which results in an enhanced customer and staff experience. For you as service provider, appointments can be a way to control and steer the flow of customers away from peak hours to less busy parts of the day. It can also be a powerful tool that delivers the customer details required for the service provider to staff more appropriately and delivers better customer service.

Upon arrival, customers with a pre-booked appointment can check in for their appointment in different ways - going to the reception, scanning a QR code or using a self-service kiosk. Walk-in visitors can get in line for their required service through the self-service kiosk, staff or use a QR code to obtain a ticket and be placed in an appropriate queue. With a customer journey management system, you can segment customers in different queues. The most common segmentation is based on customer needs, e.g., separate queues for separate services. Customers with more complex service requirements can then be managed separately, which reduces the wait time for other customers, and improves their service experience. It also allows the service provider to match customers with the staff who have the most suitable competence to respond to their needs.

After arrival and queue entry, most customers will endure a period of waiting. A balanced and controlled waiting period is the optimal result for a manager. No one wants to have a completely empty waiting area, as it would most likely mean you are overstaffed. A customer journey management system can help managers get the balance just right by improving staff planning and by adding more flexibility to the processes. From a customer journey perspective this step has the greatest risk of impacting customer service experience negatively if not managed appropriately. To continuously get information about what is happening is an important aspect of the waiting step. This can be achieved for example with waiting area displays with queue information or text messages sent to the customer.

When the customer is being served, data on their visit can be captured and made available for real-time insight through management dashboards. It can also be stored for later use. For instance, management could use the information to view customer wait times or find out how long different transactions take to complete. This also enables management to have an instant overview of the service situation at one or several locations in real time. Customer Journey Management provides the ability to see details such as number of open counters, services offered, current waiting times, and number of customers seen at each counter as well as transaction times. Alert mechanisms can give the manager the opportunity to act if waiting times exceed preset limits.

A crucial aspect of the post-visit stage is gathering customer feedback. By enabling customers to rate their visit and provide feedback, management can later analyze the quality of customer service from different parameters, for example, staff competence, interpersonal interaction, and operating standards to other areas of improvement. Customer feedback is a valuable source of information, which serves as the foundation of understanding what customers want most, and when and where they want to engage with you.

When data from the journey process is gathered and stored, management can use that data to analyze and optimize their current processes. Reports can be generated on employee/customer interactions, service times, customer wait times etc. Operational inefficiencies can be identified and addressed through process changes or training. Trend analysis provided by system reports help the user to manage staff in line with peaks and quieter times in the service area. Customer segmentation, staff scheduling, media content, etc. can be tested, evaluated, and modified based on insights from analysis of the collected data. Statistical reports are also useful tools for achieving and reporting on a variety of organizational targets. For service providers with targets related to service levels rather than profits, the information captured by the customer journey management platform can be an important tool for measuring and evaluating performance. As the system can be seamlessly connected to any number of service access points over a wide geographical area, managers can have a complete overview of their service network.