Catch the latest digital CX trends, how to maximize CX ROI, digital activities and data analytics to provide the best customer experiences, and how to leverage the link between content and SEO.

Participants will also have the opportunity to learn best practices adopted by PepsiCo, McDonald’s, Porsche, Lenovo, Tim Hortons, AT&T, RBC, City of Las Vegas, LinkedIn, Mars, GoDaddy, and more, while networking with accomplished CX executives from reputable brands and over 450 CX thought leaders.

Here are a few sessions we’d like to highlight:

CX data and analytics

Customer data and related insights are a foundational aspect of ongoing product and services decision-making. We often find organizations struggle with knowing what data is valuable and how to leverage it towards improved customer experience. We expect these two talks will bring clarity on how to improve your data practices.

1. Day 2 Opening Panel Discussion: Actionable Insights – Harness CX Data Analytics for Actionable Insights That Drive Bottom-Line Results with Ashley Fitzgerald, Afshin Ahangar, John Ross, and John Oxford, Wednesday at 10:05 AM
2. Industry Expert: Harvesting Better Data – The Unstructured Data Goldmine: Target, Extract, & Share Value with Josh Snider, Wednesday at 11:45 AM

Customer journey best practices

Another typical organizational gap covered in these talks: unifying customer communication across all channels and eliminating information silos, often described as omni-channel, or a 360 degree customer view.

1. Industry Expert: Unify, Streamline, Connect – How to Build Better Customer Journeys with Amrit Dhangal, Wednesday at 10:40 AM
2. Spotlight Session: Powering Up Digital CX Journeys – Adapt Your Customer Strategies to Meet the New Digital CX: From Consideration and Applications with Kasia Bigda, Wednesday at 3:30 PM

For more information and the full conference schedule take a look at the event website.

Register today!

Tune in March 29th and March 30th for this exciting opportunity to grow your customer experience strategy.

Tickets start at $495 and include live access and networking as well as ongoing access to the conference recordings for up to 12 months.

Ready to bring new customer experience insights and practices to your organization?

We can help improve customer reach, engagement, and retention with our efficient, data-driven approach to product strategy and service design.

Get in touch

The post Digital Customer Experience Summit, March 29-30, 2022 appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Businesses of varying sizes are facing increasing pressure to go digital, as lean, data-driven competition pushes ahead. Management consultants at Say Yeah look to the challenge of helping companies make the transformation to digital.

Say Yeah founder and CEO Lee Dale is no stranger to the growing pains of getting a company to move forward with digital projects.

When Virgin Gaming hired Say Yeah, they were struggling to get customers to put money in their gaming accounts. The largely manual process had customer service reps jumping between multiple applications, carefully checking each step along the way in order not to lose any money. With each customer service rep having to use five separate documents for each case, with up to 45 steps included each time, there were multiple chances for human error. Meanwhile, the customer was waiting for a long period of time before being able to access their funds.

Despite having a digital offering, it was not optimized for the customer experience.

Say Yeah used a combination of research and data analysis to optimize the service and learn how the customer’s overall experience could be improved in what was undeniably an overly complicated process.

Recommendations made by Say Yeah included automation to reduce time and human error, information-design to improve the workflow and improved communication and speed to meet client requests. Virgin Gaming was able to reduce a 45-step process that was stressful for both customers and employees into a simple three-step list of tasks for each customer service rep.

Virgin Gaming is one example of how Say Yeah looks at customer journeys, going to the heart of the changes that are being driven by social environments. Dale addresses this priority in the form of a simple question: “How do you provide meaningful service across those spaces that people are using?” The geography of digital is vast, and it’s important to focus the particular mix of devices, contexts or locations that will impact a business or a product.

The key is to approach a business from the customer’s perspective and an appreciation that it typically involves more than just one interaction leading to a sale — it’s about addressing the entirety of a customer’s interactions, including the post-purchase experience, to get a better idea of where a business could create more value.

By identifying the customer journeys that are going on around your business, and continually evaluating this process from the customer’s point of view, value can be created out of better understanding of how they’re interacting with a company in a digital space.

For Dale, who founded Say Yeah in 2008 when mobile began to take shape with the iPhone’s release, digital transformation is all about helping businesses find efficiencies and make smarter decisions.

“Regardless of the level of digital literacy within an organization, there are missing pieces,” Dale said. Say Yeah will begin its process of working with businesses by auditing workflow and setup in order to determine if there are missing pieces in a business process. In addition, Say Yeah will advise a business on where they think the value is for the customer, a focal point that is key to growing a digital footprint and funnel that attracts customers.

Dale says it’s all about being practical and setting sights on the more immediate goals for any business looking to innovate. The majority of customers that approach the Toronto-based management consulting company come to Say Yeah with a problem that needs fixing. More often than not, technology provides a solution.

A recent study by the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses (CFIB) shows that businesses understand the need to go digital. But a majority of businesses and companies surveyed by CFIB are still dragging their feet on things like data and multiple channels of social media — there’s more to digital life than just Facebook, after all.

While the company began by focusing on small- and medium- sized businesses, Say Yeah now works with larger companies from a variety of backgrounds — financial services, insurance, sports work and various B2B organizations.

There are multiple things to consider when making the jump to digital. When it comes to looking at customer journeys and finding value and efficiencies, regardless of the project or scale, digital tools and processes can give businesses the leg up they need.

View article in dxjournal.co

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On September 21, from noon to 1pm, find the answer to moving from product-limited tweaking to a market-defining organization. No longer is it enough to focus user experience on a product at a time or serving just the customers you know.

Say Yeah is teaming with the Association of Registered Graphic Designers (RGD) to host a system strategy webinar.

This 60-minute session will take viewers through an in-depth discussion on an approach that unites organizational efforts with market opportunities.

The post A system strategy webinar from the Association of Registered Graphic Designers (RGD) appeared first on Say Yeah!.

The virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein.”

― José Saramago, The Stone Raft

Creating customer journey maps is one of the hottest trends in user-focused marketing today. Understanding how to use them allows businesses to maximize product potential by informing intelligent web design that interprets, predicts, and aligns web properties with the needs and desires of their user base.

Journey maps also increase the agility of websites and apps, allowing them to be both proactive and reactive to consumer desires and behavior.

Customer journey maps give marketers and product managers the ability to create websites, apps, and other digital products fine tuned to the needs of their customers, while also driving those users toward business goals. There’s no doubt, learning to create and use customer journey maps is an essential skill for entrepreneurs.

What is a customer journey map?

Customer journey mapping relies on the basic principle of cartography—creating a simple visualization that effectively communicates a complex reality.

A customer journey map is a detailed visual representation of the customer purchase and retention journey. It is a tool that helps to identify the customer’s desires, goals and actions they take to achieve them, all aligned to key business drivers.

The customer journey map gives new business leaders a tool to discover where business goals align with customer goals. With this information, they can better identify all relevant consumer touchpoints that shape their decision to choose, purchase, and continue to use products and services.

The map works both as an alternative to, or in conjunction with, traditional sales funnels. The sales funnel puts more focus on what businesses are looking to accomplish, while a customer journey map focuses on the state of mind of the customer and what the consumer seeks to accomplish through their interactions with a business.

The task then becomes to align your information, calls to action, and funnels, to the customer’s natural path as they interact with and move from channel to channel.

Building a customer journey map

Building a customer journey map requires four key points of information:

• Customer Profiles/Personas
• Behavior Stages
• Customer Goals
• Touchpoints/Channels

Customer Profiles/Personas

Personas are a commonly used tool to describe the relevant characteristics of a target customer. It’s a fictionalized summary created by gathering details of typical customers through interviews, surveys, and contextual inquiry.

Customer journey maps include personas as a way of illustrating how each customer type moves through a typical customer journey. In the map each persona type is generally presented as a specific person going through the stages.

For example, you may divide your key personas into mindsets and demographics such as single professional men, newlyweds, or baby boomer couples who are slow to adopt mobile devices.

Behavior Stages

Behavior stages show the typical steps that a customer takes as they choose and use a product or service. Customer behavior stages can vary from company to company or between different brands or products. User research combined with analytics will reveal the behaviour stages for a given customer journey.

An example of a common customer behavior stage progression could be:

Discovery → Research → Comparison → Selection → Conversion → Renewal

While in the past customer journeys were thought to be linear, today we know that customers can move through different stages in a circular or non-linear fashion.

Customer Goals

Customer journey maps should include customer goals for each of the behavior stages. Understanding people’s motivations as well as how goals change over time helps to create more effective and personalized engagement in each stage.

Mapping out customer goals helps uncover where customer goals intersect with business or product goals, helping to focus efforts on maximizing engagement and conversion potential while supporting an exceptional customer experience.

Touchpoints/Channels

Touchpoints are where the customer interacts with a business along their journey. Many of these interactions will correspond with behavior stages (see above).

At each of these touchpoints you should map the emotional (what is the user’s state of mind), social (what does the user need to discuss or share), and functional (what task(s) does a user need to be able to perform) requirements of the target personas.

Photo: © vadymvdrobot, YFS Magazine

With each of these considerations, you’ll learn more about how to communicate with your customers, how to support their needs, and what information, tools, and interactions you’ll need to help them reach the next step in their journey.

For example, if a customer has anxiety about a company’s credibility during the trial phase, marketing and product teams who are aware of these emotional considerations can make adjustments to alleviate these concerns, whether in the language used, the information communicated, highlighting security and safety, showcasing testimonials, and so on.

Your roadmap to customer experience success

Your end goal is to define the media and interactions that will best drive users to the next step in the customer journey and towards business goals. It’s essential when working through this part of the exercise that channel owners and stakeholders collaborate with the user’s journey in mind. Work together to understand how a customer can best move from marketing and sales driven awareness to product, retention, and support.

From step to step, touchpoint to touchpoint, the journey map becomes your roadmap to ensure the customer experience is effective, efficient, consistent, and joyful from start to finish.

Applying the customer journey map

The customer journey map is a highly effective tool to better understand and communicate customer needs and the actions your business needs to define to help users meet these needs. The map illustrates the relevant inputs that should inform key business interactions, media, content, and design decisions for a more streamlined customer experience.

When maps are used effectively, companies see an increase in conversions and engagement, while reducing customer support requirements. The end result? Happier customers who are more likely to purchase, renew, and advocate for your product or service.

This article has been edited and condensed.

Lee Dale is the co-founder of Say Yeah!, Toronto’s multichannel experience design studio. Say Yeah! specializes in user interface design with a focus on improving customer experience. We work across channels with an emphasis on web and mobile to ensure that digital products provide a great customer experience across all touch points. Since co-founding Say Yeah!, Lee has worked with numerous organizations big and small including Virgin Gaming, Kanetix, theScore, and many more. Their work has also helped their clients secure investments and beneficial partnerships with organizations such as Indigo, Microsoft, and Rogers. Connect with @sayyeahto on Twitter.

View article at: yfsmagazine.com

The post Customer Journey Maps, Key Tool For Driving Engagement – YFS Magazine appeared first on Say Yeah!.

With knowledge of this key tool for driving customer experience across channels accelerating throughout the past year, you can expect customer journey mapping to be among the biggest digital marketing buzzwords of 2016.

As Chris Risdon at CapitalOneLabs said in 2011: “their importance exceeds their prevalence.” That’s finally starting to change.

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

In a sentence, customer journey mapping is the process of defining a comprehensive and actionable step-by-step path of your customer’s complete journey in addressing a problem or need they have identified.

From awareness of the product to customer retention, including sales touch points, engagements with your product or service, and any other customer interactions which fall in between, customer journey maps help to give a better understanding of customer motivations, goals, and behaviors.

From Joel Flom’s UX Matters article comes this example of someone looking for broadband service in 2010 (click to view full size):

Why Should I use Customer Journey Maps?

Whether you are launching a new digital product or updating an existing site, app, or other digital property, Customer journey maps provide valuable insight, informing: strategy, design, and content.

Customer journey maps help to better define the who, what, why, when, where, and how of customer decision-making by taking an in-depth look at customer personas, timelines, emotions, touchpoints, and channels, throughout the customer journey.

Well-considered customer journey maps enable you to:

1. determine the ideal channels to reach customers at different points of their journey;
2. work with sales, marketing, and support to identify the content necessary to drive users to action across those channels;
3. focus each of your digital properties around the role they fulfill within the customer journey.

This example highlights the key media required across various touchpoints in a sales funnel (click to view full size):

Ultimately, your customer journey map is the key tool you’ll use to increase conversions and improve customer retention.

So why should you use customer journey maps? Because they inform successful and profitable digital properties.

Get Mapping

Do you need help creating your customer journey map and understanding how your digital properties can be better aligned to your customer’s journey?

Get in touch.

The post Customer journey maps: Why your digital team should be using them appeared first on Say Yeah!.

In the digital design world, there’s an essential part of fulfilling the promise of a digital product for a consumer, such as a website that users have to work through. An essential part of the design process for interactive digital media is to map out the user journey and ensure that the design of your product makes the journey as easy to follow and as rewarding as possible.

So what does a user journey look like beyond digital? The user experience journey is the path a user takes when interacting with a brand, whether through a product or service offering. Regardless of the engagement model, the journey begins with a consumer’s first exposure to a brand. This exposure may come in the form or traditional media (print, web, and other advertising media).

In each of these cases, media plays an important role in the customer user experience, and may even lead the customer experience, but it’s just a piece of that experience. And if you’re not considering all of the customer touch points, you may be disconnected from a key piece of the customer journey puzzle, where content, design, and interactions are shaping expectations.

It may often seem, when working in isolation on a particular piece of media, that once you complete your work it is a successful project. However, it’s important to recognize that expectations set with other media or customer interactions that may not be reflected in your work can cause friction for customers. This is precisely because the customer views every interaction through the same brand lens, regardless of medium. One company; one set of expectations.

This is why it’s important to frame your work around the customer journey, taking the customer’s lead in coming up with design solutions that tell the same story and set the same expectations across all touchpoints.

Consider these truths:

1. Customer needs transcend departments, as the customer interacts across different digital and physical media or other touchpoints, whether as part of a buying process or for ongoing customer service.

2. When different departments are telling different stories, dealing with issues in different ways, or following different rules, this compounds frustration for customers.

It’s on us as designers to meet the real-world needs of users across all the touchpoints in the business. By mapping out and following these touchpoints, we can begin to see how consumers try to move between them, identify the challenges they face along the way, and find ways to communicate with them to help make that journey more rewarding.

Armed with this knowledge, if you’re working on a print piece or even branching out into digital media, you’ll have the information you need to design the right media. You’ll understand the purpose of that media within the context of where and when a customer is likely to engage in that media. And you’ll be able to create more effective work by understanding how that media leads to and from other channels.

With that in mind, let’s look at a couple of scenarios where a customer journey moves from digital to physical (or vice versa).

Retail stores: sure there’s a website, but is the design of the in-store experience reflective of the expectations being set online, and vice versa. Does this then hold true for new buyers, for returning customers, for customers who may be looking for help with a return, a gift, or availability of a product. Each of these scenarios is a different journey.

Focusing on returning customers, the media that help bring them back, from marketing storytelling, to promotional media, including email, physical mailers, and POS displays. All of this media has to play its part in the user journey to help ensure that happy returning customer.

Serviced based organization: the primary user journey here is based on the sales cycle; what media does the customer need to see in order to complete a sale. A website may play a key role, but so could a brochure, pitch deck, and other forms of print media. When designing each of these pieces, you have to ensure that a consistent story is being told with clear calls to action to help move the customer through the purchase funnel. depending on where i In other words, where the customer the buying process should greatly influence your design.

In each of these scenarios, you’re responsible for conveying the right detail and information to a customer who expects to move seamlessly between digital and real world channels, if you understand where they are in the journey, then you can integrate the customer’s specific needs into your design.

To help you through the user journey process, ask yourself these questions:

1. Does the media I’m working on serve a customer’s needs based on where they are in their journey?

2. Does the media work within the context of the other media or service the customer’s received along their journey? Does what I’m designing make sense with what the customer just saw or is about to see? With an interaction they’ve had or can expect to have?

3. Now that I have a better understanding of the customer’s needs, can I identify better ways of communicating with the customer through the media I’m responsible for?

4. Does this better way of communicating translate to other channels? And if so, have I shared this information with the other departments responsible so we can collectively improve that customer journey and streamline our communication efforts?

Answer those questions and you’ll be able to not just do better work, but also help out other departments in better understanding and reacting to the customer journey.

About Lee Dale

I help companies bring digital products to market that make a bottom line difference, ensuring that all consumer touchpoints in a product lifecycle meet their promise for the business and its users. Since co-founding Say Yeah, I’ve worked with numerous organizations big and small including Tourism Toronto, Kanetix, Virgin Gaming, and many more. Our work has also helped our clients secure investments and beneficial partnerships with organizations such as Indigo, Microsoft, and Rogers. I have also given talks related to business, technology, and user experience design in Toronto, Montreal, and at SXSW in Austin, Texas.

You can see more articles from Lee on the Digital  Insights blog.

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