Viewpoint
You may be wondering why we are spending so much time promoting the idea of customer journey mapping—producing white papers for hospitality and healthcare, blog posts, the ARDA World 2018 workshop, and other thought leadership initiatives that assert it is a key strategy for improving customer experience, reputation, and revenues. Here’s why: We are big believers in journey mapping because we’ve done it ourselves and it’s made a world of difference.
I don’t say that lightly. We have long prided ourselves on providing excellent customer service, and it’s a core value of this company. But there is always room to improve.
That’s in part because shifting the emphasis from customer service to the entire customer experience underscores that everyone at Nordis has a responsibility and role, not just our client services team.
To map the journey and identify pain and friction points, we brought in a consultant to gain an outsider’s perspective who in turn listened to client calls and interviewed employees. In keeping with best practices, we prioritized the points along the journey that we wanted to enhance and selected one area of focus in particular, new client/program on-boarding. We determined that we could significantly accelerate the Expresso implementation process and create a better customer experience for both clients adding new products and services and for new client on-boarding.
To ensure a smoother and faster transition, we developed a detailed journey map and workflow that includes all of the client touch points from the initial marketing or sales contact through on-boarding. Then we looked at ways to make the on-boarding experience better, including implementing new technology solutions, redesigning roles and developing new ones, improving cross-team collaboration, and moving and consolidating tasks.
Once an implementation goes live, we’ve created a hyper-care period during which the implementation team stays engaged for the first few months as the client relationship shifts to a Nordis client services manager. We also expanded the team, adding a client relations director and sales and marketing operations director, and formalized post-installation feedback through a client survey.
We aren’t done. We are using the Lean method of rapid testing and iteration to continue improving the process. Next, we are focusing on the parts of the journey involving customer services and sales.
Our pledge to you is that we will always be looking at ways to improve the Nordis client experience. We would love to hear how you think we are doing and about your own experiences with enhancing the customer experience and journey mapping.
Please get in touch.
