How to Craft a Seamless Customer Journey | Dan Gingiss | Engati Engage

Dan Gingiss is the Chief Experience Officer of The Experience Maker.

He coaches companies on how great CX can be their best marketing.

Dan is also a keynote speaker and an experience coach and with more than 20 years of professional experience at companies like McDonald’s, Discover, and Humana.

Dan Gingiss is also one of the hosts of the Experience This! Show, available on Spotify, iTunes and Stitcher.

Dan Gingiss on Video

Crafting a Seamless Customer Journey

This section will contain a quick summary of our interview with Dan. But, if you’d rather hear him yourself, we have our Spotify podcast embedded below.

Dive in to learn to create a seamless customer journey.

What is the one factor that most businesses fail to take into account while crafting customer experiences?

Businesses are building experiences for their customers, but not taking their input into consideration.

Most companies are trying to emulate Apple, who essentially said, “If we asked people what they wanted, we’d never build what we made”.

Even though companies like Apple and Amazon seem to know what their customers want before they even want it, most companies do need to listen to their customers.

And people are more than willing to talk to you about want they want, what they need, what they like and what they don’t like about your offerings. All you have to do is make the effort to talk to them.

Obviously, the most innovative companies are going to come up with offerings that customers don’t even know they want yet.

But a lot of companies are not even providing a basic semblance of what their customers want yet. They’re not even delivering a basic, acceptable experience.

Dan likes to talk about the difference between and experiences.

The main difference is that ordinary experiences are not memorable. Nobody goes to their friend saying, ‘let me tell you about the perfectly average experience I had’.

People remember extraordinary experiences. And talk about them.

But if you thought such experiences necessarily come at a high cost, you’re mistaken.

Extraordinary experiences don’t necessarily have to be expensive! Click To Tweet

They don’t need to be super high-end. They just need to be above the average ones so that they’re worth talking about.

Would you say that the desire to create decent customer experiences is actually what’s keeping businesses away from their potential to create great customer experiences?

Dan agrees with this. He says that we need to get the basics right; and then move on to creating great experiences.

He asks that companies show step into their customer’s shoes. Experience the process that they have to go through and see what their customers see.

There may be some minor irritants in the process that you need to get rid off before you can move on to create great experiences.

And the great ones don’t need to be expensive.

Dan always talks about simple, practical and affordable ideas that you can implement to create a great experience.

People are actually more willing to share positive experiences than negative ones. We just have to give them more positive experiences.

And the experiences don’t need to be grand, they can just be unexpected and still have be memorable.

For example, instead of sending a customer an email to thank them, you could just send them a handwritten note. That’s not expensive, won’t take too much time, but will definitely be more memorable than an email.

Learn how to create memorable experiences in our FREE e-book, ‘The Evolution of Customer Experiences.

What is a digital experience for customers? What are the digital touchpoints that warrant the most attention?

One of the challenges with CX is that if any of the touchpoints fail, the entire experience may fail.

You need to look at your analytics and see what your customers are saying.

Small changes can make a huge difference.

When Dan was working with Discover, a credit card company, their analytics showed that most of their website visitors were coming to see their most recent transactions.

But it took 2–3 clicks to reach the transactions. And many banks, even today, are making it hard for customers to get to those transactions.

What Discover did, is they created a feed of sorts on their homepage. And the moment you accessed the website, you could see your last 10 transactions on the feed. They made it a 0 click process.

The very next day, the website’s metrics completely changed.

The Bounce Rate rose phenomenally. And since that refers to people coming to your website and then leaving, without viewing any other pages, it’s usually bad when it goes up.

But for Discover, this was a good thing.

It meant that people were getting exactly what they wanted, without having to put in any extra effort. Nobody wants to spend more time than they need to on a credit card website.

But the other metric that changed was their customer satisfaction scores. They went through the roof. Their customers got exactly what they wanted, with zero effort.

So, Dan advises that you need to see what your customers want and make it easy for them to get it. Reduce the number of clicks in a path.

If it’s 3 clicks, make it 2 clicks. If it’s 2 clicks, make it 1 click.

Make it easier for them to find what they are looking for

You should also look at what people are searching for on your site.

If they’re searching for something, that means it’s hard to find, so find a way to make it easily accessible.

Chatbots can be very useful in this situation. The customer just needs to ask the question and the bot has the answer.

And when bots know their limitations and can say, ‘sure, I can answer a most questions, but this one is more complicated, let me send this user off to a human agent right away’, then they’re doing great.

Let the customers get their answer as soon as possible and then leave.

No customer has any interest in talking to a human agent or a bot for longer than they have to. Calling customer service is not the highlight of their day.

So, give them a way to find an answer as fast as possible.

How is AI and modern technology in general, helping businesses create better experiences and provide better service?

We have way too much data today to crunch it all in our brains.

Companies are really good at creating reports. But reports don’t help you take action.

But AI can go through all the data, interpret it, make observations and suggest a new course of action.

Now you can spend your time actually taking action , rather than simply trying to figure out what to do.

How are brands leveraging video marketing? Is it still in an adolescent stage?

Video marketing is still early for most companies.

Dan says it’s being used widely by solopreneurs and smaller companies than larger ones.

It is difficult to scale video, but it’s been done well by a few companies.

A cable company in the UK sends your first bill in the form of a personalized explainer video.

The actors in every customer’s video are the same, but the bill in the video has the customer’s own name and numbers. It’s your own bill.

The customer feels like it’s something done personally for them.

Companies should try to find a way to create a personalized engagement with their customers. As we spoke about thank you notes, another option could be to thank them over a video.

Dan goes on to say that videos are a good way to simplify complicated things about your business.

He says that you should try to make things as simple as possible for them.

Avoid using industry jargon as far as possible.

Lawyers tend to overcomplicate this quite a bit, but they can make it fun.

A company called iFlix starts their legal disclaimer at the bottom of their emails with the words, ‘COVERING OUR BUTTS’. It’s funny, it’s unexpected and it gets people to keep reading.

Velcro also made an entire video after their patent expired, telling people that generic versions of the product are not Velcro, they’re ‘Hook and Loop’. And if they just spoke in legal terms, nobody would watch it, but since they made a hilarious music video out of it, it went viral.

And these two companies took an ordinary experience and made it extraordinary. They made it memorable.

Are there any other thoughts that you’d like to leave our audience with?

The hardest thing to do is to look at the entire customer journey, from a macro view. The entire journey, across departments.

For example, in a B2B situation, the worst handoff is when a customer goes from the Salesperson to the Account Manager. The salesperson got the customer convinced to buy, but now you’re telling them that they have to do business with someone else.

Instead of telling the salesperson to immediately make another sale, get them to make sure the customer doesn’t have buyer’s remorse.

Help your customers find what they’re looking for

Dan says that we should make it easier for our customers to find what they’re looking for. Answer their queries as fast as possible and provide them with an amazing experience.

He also says that chatbots can help accomplish this.

So, it’s time to make your customers’ lives easier. Get an Engati chatbot for free today. No credit card needed. Start now and get one step closer to a seamless customer journey.

Crafting Customer Journeys- A Spotify Podcast

Engati Engage

We hope you’ve learned a lot about the fine art of creating a seamless customer journey in this interview with Dan Gingiss. Engati Engage will be back with a new expert in a new episode soon. Stay tuned.

Find Dan Gingiss

Dan Gingiss is an absolute genius when it comes to customer experience. You should definitely follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter to gain more insights on crafting seamless customer experiences.

More from Engati Engage

Now that you’ve learnt how to craft a seamless customer journey, its time to see how you can pull AI into your CX strategy. Check out our interview with CX guru, Adrian Swinscoe on the AI Experience.