Optimising the customer journey

A loyalty theme that continues to be high up the priority list for many organisations is how to enhance and optimise the customer journey and experience across key touch points.  The results from a 2011 survey of airlines and hotels conducted by ICLP and Airline Information highlighted that customers were firmly at the centre of their priorities, as improving the customer experience came out as their number one business priority.

The reasons for investing time and effort in this are clear: interact more with customers to increase engagement, identify opportunities to generate incremental revenue and build longer term loyalty.

In order to improve the customer experience, brands need to understand and see the journey through the eyes of the customer. The research also provided some fascinating insights in that whilst just over 50% of airlines have identified all of the touch points, 25% of them had not implemented any improvements and 21% of respondents hadn't yet mapped out the customer journey.

It is important to use the customer journey as a framework to identify where a real difference can be made to the customer experience at the touch points which matter most to their customers.  For the brand, it can help understand which interactions can be leveraged to address the business objectives of reducing costs and driving more revenue and loyalty - both at a global and local level. 

View the illustration below which highlights examples of how the customer journey can be optimised at each touchpoint.  It is based on Bob who is a customer of an FFP programme and his wife Mary who plan and take a city break in New York.  It has a timeline bar at the top of each slide so that you can see where they are in our journey illustration, and there is a point's balance at the bottom which shows where they earn or redeem their points during that journey.