The Empathy Edge

Aransas Savas: Forget Journey Mapping: Define a More Valuable Customer Experience

Nov 28, 2023

53:00

Your customer is the lifeblood of your company. We hear this over and over again. Yet, companies don't do a great job of crafting a customer experience that actually meets our needs, values our time, and helps us achieve our goals.

Customer experience is all the rage - why do so many companies get it wrong?

Today, Aransas Savas and I discuss the myths of customer experience strategy: where companies go wrong in aligning the entire business around the customer's experience and why those end-of-call automated surveys just give you useless data. She shares her own experiences with brands on creating shifts in how the company views customer needs. Aransas shares the concept of "Jobs to Be Done" as a useful way to segment what customers need from you, why journey mapping and Net Promoter Scores don't give you a holistic picture of customer experience, and why it's far more useful to consider modes instead. We discuss how measuring Time Well Spent, Time Well Invested, and Time Well Saved helps both B2C and B2B brands more effectively understand what customers perceive as valuable. Finally, she shares the important highlights from Stone Mantel's recent 2023 Customer Experience Trends Report.

To access the episode transcript, please click on the episode title at www.TheEmpathyEdge.com

Key Takeaways:

Customers are not robots - they will not likely follow the journeys you lay out in an idealized situation. You need to consider the customer every step of the way.
The wrong questions are being asked during traditional data collection - as we change the questions and how they’re being asked, you will be able to gather more valuable data to move forward in understanding your customer’s experience.
While AI can help to identify trends, it does still require a human touch to interpret the data for best use.
Having a company purpose does not mean you understand your customer’s purpose.

"There’s a functional job to be done, and there's an emotional, social, and aspirational job. If I can understand what all four of those are, I create a much more valuable product than if my product experience is strictly based on the functional job to be done." — Aransas Savas

About Aransas Savas, Coach & Experience Designer

Aransas Savas is a coach, an experience designer at Stone Mantel, and the co-host of the Experience Strategy Podcast. Drawing on over two decades of experience, Aransas combines behavioral science and coaching to partner with experience strategists at leading consumer brands, including Weight Watchers, Best Buy, Truist Bank, and Clayton Homes to create meaningful, and often, transformative, customer journeys.

Based in Brooklyn, she is a 20-time marathoner, a wife to a newscaster, and a mother to a 200-year-old sourdough culture, a fluffy pup, and two spirited, creative girls.

References:

Stone Mantel's 2023 Experience Strategy Trends Report

80-page report of the latest must-know Experience Strategy Trends for 2023, a deep analysis of cultural and customer trends based on insights collected from more than 3,200 customers and over 200 experience strategists over the course of 20 months.

The Empathy Edge Podcast, Melina Palmer: Why Your Customers Can't Tell You What They Want

Connect with Aransas Savas

Stone Mantel: https://www.stonemantel.co/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aransassavas/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aransasrose/

Podcast: The Experience Strategy Podcast

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