Turning Pain Points Into Opportunities
Over the years, the customer journey evolved along with technology and the different channels businesses use to reach their audience. Consumers nowadays highly value solution based products more than ever. By helping users eliminate their pain points, your product is already one step ahead of its competitors.
This month’s guest speaker, Ms. Arnie Punla talked about Customer Journey Mapping — one of the best tools Product Owners can use to hit that sweet spot for best customer experience which leads to better user acquisition and retention!
In this age of omnichannels where brands are present in multiple platforms, Arnie argues that product managers are in the strategic position where they are able to influence and make customer-centric decisions by identifying unique pain points and consequent opportunities for enhancement.
For this topic, she discusses the Customer Journey Mapping and how it transforms the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to a Minimum Lovable Product (MLP). She says that we, as product managers, tend to jump into the fastest method of developing a prototype in the rush of getting the product tested but we forget that it is possible to also create a product that customers love even when released at an early stage.
The Grocery Experience: Online and Offline
Citing a popular department store chain as an example, Arnie compares the well thought out in-store customer experience and the rushed online customer experience implemented by the business as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
For the in-store experience, the ground floor was the grocery so that mothers are more able to go in-and-out considering they are buying heavy home supplies, the fathers are upstairs buying men’s goods, and technology wares are located in the higher floors because the customers for these products are more likely to have energy to make the physical trip up.
But because of the pandemic, this department store had to pivot and quickly develop an e-commerce site to sell their wares. In Arnie’s experience, since she is so used to everything being organized in-store, the mislabeling and buggy filters function in the online store was less then appealing. Not to mention, when purchasing certain items, separate portals would open and they were not even synced further adding to the confusion.
It is understandable that the latter journey was not as well thought about as it should be because the pandemic hit like a storm and there was urgency in the roll-out but it is to be expected that the customers of this brand is expecting the same ease of navigation of their product offerings as in their in-store experience. With this expectation not met given the inconsistency of experience, the brand’s reputation and reliability is damaged in the customer’s eyes. This failure could have been mitigated if the brand was sensitive to the customer’s pain points when using their service through an online channel.
The Importance Of Context: Being in the Field
When presented with just this information, you will notice that customers tend to withdraw more from ATMs 1 to 4 and deposit more from ATMS 5 to 6. If presented with this slide and when asked to solve the problem of uneven usage of ATMs that have the same functionality, what do you do? What do you think about when presented with this data?
Most PMs dive deeper into the numbers, checking the bar charts for patterns or maybe even performing maintenance on the ATMs to look for technical issues.
But in reality, the cause of the uneven usage is simply the placement of the banner above the ATMs. The usage of the vertical dotted line implies a separate of the functionality from ATMS 1 to 4 and 5 to 6. In taking a step back and in understanding the context of the problem when in the field, PMs can become more sensitive on the real pain points felt by both the business and its customers.
Being sensitive about the information that is present while in the field is better than inferring the cause of behaviors erroneously in fear of looking stupid. This way, PMs get a more holistic view of the pain points and opportunities that customers present to them.
Basic template of a Customer Journey Map
Using the journey of buying insurance as an example, Arnie shares the basic template she follows to create a cohesive customer journey map that helps identify pain points and possible solutions. The template has various elements such as:
The User Persona: When creating a persona, it is important that the profile’s behaviors, preferences, and background are well thought-out. This profile can based on a real paying customer or from an inference based on the feedback your product is receiving. Without the persona, it is possible that the solution that is being built is too broad and not responding to any specific problem or group of people.
Before building the entire Customer Journey Map, the expected buying journey of the customer must be identified based on the product that is in the market or is planned to be released. Without knowing the expected buying journey, picturing the steps the customer is taking to benefit from the service will be difficult and, worse, inaccurate.
But before you can craft your customer journey map, you need to know the buying journey of your product because without knowing the buying journey of your service, you will not be able to picture the steps the customer is taking to benefit from your product.
For the journey of buying insurance, the following stages are identified: Discovery & Awareness, Buy, Servicing, Claims, and Cancellations / Withdrawal.
The Touchpoints are a list of channels or tools that the customer uses to experience each stage of the identified journey and the Events/Actions are the user’s actions through the touchpoints in a specific part of the buying journey.
Pain points are then created by considering the persona’ profile and identifying what the possible roadblocks they may encounter that will hinder their progress through the buying journey. When writing pain points, they are not just guesses. They can be from feedback received in the past, statements from customers belonging to the same persona profile, or if the PM themselves share the same sentiments as the persona.
Lastly, Opportunities are potential solutions to the pain points described which can be implemented within the specific stage of the buying journey.
Putting all these points together, a filled-out version of the basic Customer Journey Map will look like this:
To put it all together, know the current touch points, know the current actions, identify the potential pain points based from the customer persona that you have and then tie an opportunity to that pain point.
Once you have a complete picture of the Customer Journey Map, now what? Looking at the list of pain points and opportunities, you can now understand the opportunities and build assumptions.
Draw up a solution out of the opportunities identified: The next step is to look at the opportunities and identify what best solution matches them. The solution may come from the business and operations team or the technical, design, or marketing team. But remember that to really solve the problem, it will not only come from you or one team — it will be an organization or inter-departmental effort to come up with a holistic solution for the identified problem.
Perform a test before implementation: It is possible that the solution that you have come up with will not work as smoothly as initially intended. For example, if the log-in functionality was an issue and the identified opportunity was to add more log-in options then if not tested, implementing this type of feature app-wide would possibly confuse customers and trigger the opposite kind of effect compared to what was intended.
Followup with surveys or VoC after the implementation: Voice of Consumer (VoC) are small surveys after every transaction often seen in apps like Grab or Foodpanda. It basically asks “would you recommend this app to your friends and family?” or “were you happy with the last experience you had with the app?”. This is important because this is real-time feedback from the customer right after they did the transaction that you are monitoring. If you are deploying agents to verbally get feedback from customers, sending customers another small survey right after the call will allow you to get a pulse of customer support satisfaction.
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
— Bill Gates
The Q&A session of the event is not included in this article. You can start listening to it through this link or jumping to the timestamp 36:36.
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