In the hotly contested battle for customer dollars, engagement, loyalty and referrals, companies from Apple to Netflix to Amazon are focusing on delivering an outstanding, differentiating customer experience. Primed by interactions with these and similar leaders, consumers are looking for a new level of CX from vacation ownership companies as well.
For companies in every industry, the first step to meeting these higher customer expectations is mapping the customer journey, then making technology, operational, and cultural changes to improve both specific interactions and the overall experience.
We’ve developed a white paper specifically for vacation ownership companies to help them understand and start mapping the customer journey.
The payoff for optimizing the owner journey include new levels of engagement, revenue and growth driven by more upgrades and referrals. Hotels that get the journey right have customers that may be 61% more willing to recommend the experience than customers of hotels that merely get a few interactions right, according to The CEO Guide to Customer Experience, a report by McKinsey. There’s no reason vacation ownership companies cannot achieve a similar level of preference.
What is the Customer Journey?
To begin, though, it’s critical to define this new strategic approach: So, what is a customer journey? It’s the increasingly popular term used to describe the total of experiences that customers have when interacting with a company and brand. These experiences are often called touchpoints, marking specific interactions between a company and its customers and prospects.
Touchpoints occur in a variety of channels, functions and time periods. They include an owner or potential owner reading a marketing brochure, visiting a web site, using an app, receiving an HOA meeting notice, casting a vote, and talking to a salesperson or owner services representative. Critically, the sum of the experience must be greater than its parts, or touchpoints. Customer journey mapping identifies owner pain points to eliminate and touchpoints to improve. Both are important drivers of overall CX.
One key area for focus is owner communications, which occur throughout the customer journey. Communications impact all aspects of the owner’s experience including sales and marketing, the vacation itself, and financial engagement, elections and administration, and therefore offer a tremendous opportunity to improve the entire journey.
Fortunately, companies can improve communications quickly and easily with customer communications management systems like Nordis’ cloud-based Expresso platform. Expresso simplifies and streamlines the entire communications process while providing new capabilities to interact with owners through digital channels that offer more delivery choice and personalization of owner correspondence–all without a massive IT overhaul or upgrade.
Our white paper offers much more detail on this approach and tips on how to begin making changes in your organization. We’d be glad to discuss the paper and how we can help you sharpen your focus on CX. Please send us an email at sales@nordistechnologies.com.
About the Author
Bryan joined Nordis Technologies in 2016 to manage and grow the company’s already-large vacation ownership client base. He also is responsible for business development and market expansion in the healthcare and financial services markets. Before joining Nordis, Bryan spent more than 21 years with Interval International, a leading global provider of vacation ownership services. Bryan graduated from Northwestern University with a bachelor of science in political science.
