An interesting tool that has been used by successful businesses that continue to do well in their digitized avatar is customer journey mapping. A customer journey map is the realistic story of your customer’s experience across the various touchpoints as he interacts with you while he learns about you and your offerings, compares you with his alternate choices, buys from you, and uses your products and services. The outcomes from the journey map must
- Measure and govern customer experience across touchpoints
- Align internal departments & communications across them
- Create Internal visibility & Accountability
- Strategize & Activate offerings in tune with customer experience
A simple illustration of a journey map for machines could be as below:
We know to be a relevant, successful business we must keep adding value in the eyes of the customer and our business. The direction is Output, Productivity, Total Quality, Cost of ownership, and now, overall customer experience. We, as capital equipment manufacturers, need to get into and understand the customer experience. The next step is to understand how to measure customer experience and use this as the most significant input in restructuring our companies to deliver a good customer experience, consistently.
Most of us got our act together and changed ourselves to virtual meetings, power points, and using mobile phones tablets to make sales pitches and offer support to our customers. Machine tool business is yet to adapt and be comfortable under this changed environment. Both organizations and individuals need to rethink and retool their approach to the work from the home era. Here, what I am talking about is not a strategy, which may still be largely the same, but understanding & equipping our toolbox with the newer tools that are popular with the early adopters.
The year that went by was tortuous, we experienced a curve ball thrown at us and our lives and livelihoods changed. Now that 2021 is here, we find that many of the challenges of the past year are here to stay and are also the emerging value givers & productivity enhancers to our new processes. One such important change is the phenomenon of work from home. This brings new additional challenges to the Marketing & Servicing of capital equipment, the hard-core brick and mortar equipment, and machine tools.
A simple illustration of a journey map for machines could be as below:
This content was originally published on the Ace Micromatic website.
