Please note this article was published before OEE Consulting and gobeyond joined forces to become Gobeyond Partners.

OEE Consulting has just launched a new training programme on customer journeys. Ahead of the first public course on 27th September we talked to Robin Harrison, Director of Marketing + L&D, about the ability of customer journey work to transform organisations.

What are customer journeys, and why do they matter?

A customer journey is the sum of the experiences and emotions a customer encounters as an organisation fulfils a specific need. They should be designed from the customer’s perspective to feel seamless, effortless and appropriate to expectations.

When customer journey transformation is used properly, it will free you up to look holistically at your business.

It opens up really valuable conversations about whether you are delivering what your customer wants, when and how they want it. It can even help you understand whether you could target different customers, or provide additional services.

When you consider what your customer wants (not what your business currently does) you will find that by removing unnecessary steps you can improve customer experience whilst reducing costs.

What challenges will a customer journey approach help me overcome?

Through our work supporting customer-led transformation across the service sector we’ve seen significant benefits. It will improve customer experience, reduce cost to serve, increase customer retention and reduce the cost of acquisition.

The business impact of delivering these outcomes could be as simple as making minor improvements to existing processes or upskilling certain teams. However it can also help you understand if your entire operating model needs to change to service your customer needs, or even if you need a completely new product, service, or business model.

I’m already looking at customer journeys so will this teach me anything new?

There is a clear need for a consistent definition and approach to customer journey redesign, which when done right can be revolutionary for any type of business.

Often we see that other approaches don’t address the underlying issues. Sometimes organisations undertake customer journey mapping without thinking about the ‘so what’. Frequently this thinking will only extend as far as improving specific customer touchpoints without asking whether fewer (or different) interactions should be designed in, or only starting to consider a customers’ journey from their first interaction with the business, for example.

If you’re only addressing one aspect of the customer journey you can’t fully realise its transformative power.

So who should attend the course?

Customer Journey thinking, and delivering great customer experience, should be central to the work of anyone in marketing, operations, customer service, and digital – but usually it will require collaboration from all of these parties to deliver true transformation.

This first course is aimed at people who are running or overseeing significant customer experience programmes. We also run an executive half-day session, and are developing practitioner training.

Our public training courses take place in central London venues, whilst we deliver in-house training on client sites around the world.

What should delegates expect from the day?

The training draws on extensive customer-led transformation work, with case studies illustrating techniques and benefits. Our public training brings together groups of 15 people – often from across multiple sectors – which encourages networking and sharing of best practice.

As with all our training, the course is delivered without PowerPoint slides. The exercises are designed to encourage group interaction and participation as well as embedding learning and insight.

Delegates will leave with an understanding of how to think differently about their customer experience, and how to use customer journey thinking to review the service delivery at their organisation.

Feedback from our pilot course has shown that it “brings to life what customer journeys really are, and why they are so important”.

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Find out more about the course or read our article on the importance of designing organisations around customer journeys.