Strategic Management Assignment: Customer Experience Strategy Of TK Maxx
Question
Task:
Building on the knowledge and understanding of the company, you have been asked to produce a report for the Senior Management Team (SMT) about improvements that could be made to formulate a robust customer experience strategy. You will also need to provide relevant metrics to measure Key Performance Index (KPIs). Your report on strategic management assignment should include the following:
- A comprehensive customer journey map for all stages of the customer journey. (20%)
- Using the Customer Journey map, identify and critically evaluate the key digital influences on the consumer journey to determine their relative importance at all stages of the customer journey process. (30%)
- Based on the above, formulate at least 2 CX objectives. (10%)
- Critically evaluate the relevance of different metrics, key performance index (KPI) and analytics that can be used for evidence-based decision-making to enhance customer experience strategy- (you will need to identify appropriate metrics and data analytics that will be relevant for the chosen company). (40%)
Answer
Executive summary
It is evident herein strategic management assignment that customers are considered as the key driving factor to determine the adaption the company needs to bring into the workforce to enhance the overall profitability of the organization. Customer service plays a major role in building, and maintaining a good relationship between the customers, and the firm, which is the decisive factor for any organization to sustain in the market, and retain dominance over the other competitors in the market. Therefore requirements of addressing and developing the best customer service strategy are essential to obtain. In this writing, we will discuss the multiple aspects of the digital customer service strategy of TK Maxx and will evaluate the performance of the strategy by analysing the performance based on KPI.
1. Introduction
TJ Maxx is named as TK Maxx in UK found in 1994, now the retailers have 24 different stores located different parts in UK, is the sister company of TJ Maxx in America, gives stress on offering the products at a reasonable price, which is considered as one of the most competitive advantages that management of TK Maxx possess to differentiate their activity from other competitors in the market. Customer service is one of the main attributes behind the success of entities. However, due to the COVID 19, the market is going through a recession period, due to the deployed restriction in the fashion industry, the management finding difficulties in building, and maintaining a good relationship with their consumers. Being a customer experience manager of the organization I am entitled to develop the best strategy to enhance the digital customer experience, therefore the company retains dominance over its competitors in the market, and retains the marketplace. In the preceding sections I will try to evaluate the importance of each stage incorporated in the customer journey process, through identifying the importance of all stages, and finally, evaluate the performance of the customer experience department of the organization through key performance indexes, and obtain the best digital customer experience strategy for TK Maxx.
2. Findings
a. Description of all stages of customer journey of a customer at TK Maxx
A customer interact with the company via myriad points of touch in several media, and channels, therefore the overall nature of customer experience is more social with professional touch (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016). Overall customer service is defined as a series of interactions as a tool of marketing, between the service providers, and consumers. The perspective of the customer services increases with increasing complexity in the expansion of customer service's process-related activities. It has been found that the company with modern customer experience strategies and technologies enjoys about 4- 8 % of higher profit than the competitors with less advanced tools in customer services.
Figure- Shift in customer experience
(Source: https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/blog/sales-and-marketing/2018/customer-journey-map-definition-benefits-examples)
There is a huge difference between the traditional, and the conventional way of the customer journey, and the modern digital customer journey which is more complex, and more efficient.
Figure- Traditional customer journey
(Source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/499899627372783162/)
However with emerging advanced digital technologies such as mobility, analytics, Internet of Things, cloud computing, and social network making the traditional approach in maintaining the relationship with the consumer redundant and compelling entities like TK Maxx to incorporate more advanced technology-driven customer service to enhance, and facilitate the whole process of the consumer journey to retain the marketplace.
Modern and digital customer journeys consist of multiple stages, which are interconnected with each other systematically, and discussed each stage below.
Figure- Digital customer journey
(Source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/499899627372783162/)
Shop online
Shopping online has become common after the accessibility of the internet. A consumer can order a specific product online by simply clicking on the bottom provided in a specific app or website, after evaluating the criteria and selecting the transaction option that the customer wants to pay through.
View print ad
The print ad is another medium a company can use to promote their product to convince a consumer to consider purchasing the particular product according to the requirement of the consumer.
Watch video on mobile
Mobile has become more affordable, and easy to use due to its user-friendly interface, supporting the consumer to navigate multiple options such as search engines, mobile apps, which are being used by the consumer during purchasing of a product online.
Download app
Mobile and web application have become an essential tool, or software available in multiple app stores, can be used by the consumer during buying of a product and sending feedback, or discussion over any quarries related to the product through the chat box, and over the call on the number being provided in the app.
Watch YouTube add
YouTube is another medium, a company can use to promote their product creatively by crafting an advertisement, where their approach to attracting the customer to purchase their product, by trying to give possible information about the product, and relating them with real-life experience that every consumer confronts in daily lives.
Purchase in-store
However purchasing in-store is a conventional, and traditional way to purchase, still due to its advantage of direct interaction with salespeople, and option for trial makes the process of purchasing for consumers more reliable, and satisfactory.
Read reviewing
To showcase the ethical consideration, and integrity of an organization, customer can provide their feedbacks in their apps, which are further used during the process of evaluation by a consumer during consideration of purchasing specific products, apart from that feedback reviewing there are multiple experts develop a detailed review report on multiple platforms on online, which add expertise touch, which also considered before buying a product by a customer.
Like on Facebook
Facebook is another channel used by both the consumer to navigate the requirements through, and organization to promote, and inform about the information related to products. Like on the Facebook page is a parameter to disclose the popularity of the offerings, and the organization offering it.
View YouTube ad
Nowadays easy accessibility increases the surfing networks of consumers, and companies are using it through advertisements on YouTube to reach their consumers, and views on YouTube ads are a determining factor of popularity of a product, to identify the pattern of the consumer’s requirement.
Purchase via mobile
Due to the portability, affordability, and user-friendly interface of mobile apps, makes the process to buy through mobile for consumers easy, and effective.
Post reviews
Post reviews on company-owned apps are an evaluation tool for the consumer during consideration of purchasing a product.
Comparison online
Due to competitiveness of market and availability of same category product giving multiple options to the consumers to compare the product details, and pricing of product through multiple e-commerce websites, compelling the organization to offer their product at a lower price to retain the market place.
Blog
Blog writing is another tactics used by the business entities to promotional activity. A consumer often prefers blogs related to specific product, and service to identify the product values, and the compare the price with its value proposition.
Purchase through the call centre
The call centre is a conventional, however still an effective process to purchase, clarify all details about the product, and discount is being offered by the company associated with the product, and launching feedback, and reporting complaints about the quality of the product, and the service being provided by the company.
Watch tutorial
The tutorial is another medium, through which consumers can get a detailed clarification about the whole process of completing purchasing successfully, including the process of registration, the process of searching the specific product, the process of transaction, and applying the available coupon code to make customers aware about digital purchasing.
View banner ad
Despite the modern and digital promotion being more effective, still, companies prefer to develop banners with possible information about details of the product, which play a key role in the process of the customer journey.
b. Customer journey mapping
Customer Experience is a phenomenon related to service sciences and marketing. Due to the increased accessibility of the internet, the concept of computer-human interaction has become more significant than ever (Bascur et al., 2018).
There are various ways to derive the customer journey mapping, in this particular section we will try to derive the customer journey map and influence of digital technology in the process of mapping and will further evaluate the strength, and weakness of this approach of the mapping customer journey.
Addressing, listing, and outlining all touchpoints
This is a stage of identifying all possible ways the customer can interact with the brand. The emergence of digital technology has brought drastic changes in the process of interaction, and point of touch between the consumer, and organization. Some digital mediums highly used by organizations these days are social media, website, mobile apps, telephonic customer service with a broader network, customer directory, print, and digital media for advertising offerings. The digital influences of social media reshaped the strategies of customer acquisition more in more cost effective manner. These digital influences also facilitate the customer interaction with the representatives of the company. Product catalogs allows the customer to get a detail information about the product description which play a major role during the process of purchasing which include the removing friction by adding CTA.
Choosing an organization's target consumer persona
Whether it is purchase behaviour or demographic traits, narrow the complexity of the customer mapping, help to develop a framework effectively. Selection of consumer persona humanizes the concept of the customer and motivates individuals to touch each stage. Technological advancement like AI, IoT, Machine learning makes the process of evaluation of algorithms more effective to identify the pattern of purchasing of consumers. For example, female first-time buyers are between the ages of 18 to 34.
Identify the objectives of consumer
To identify what a customer is looking to gain from a specific brand it is necessary to move along with the customers’ path to purchase. In this digital era through website customer searches facilitate the process of procuring the basic information about the brand, through social media customer can identify the relationship between a customer with company, through browsing in mobile app customer can procure purchase, and pricing details of a specific product, though the telephonic medium is relatively old, and tradition, however evolution of digital technology advanced, expanded the network of it.
Mapping out, and visualizing the flow of interaction of customers
The ultimate goal of the customer journey is purchasing, however nowadays it goes beyond just a simple process, it is now extended up to building a relationship with the customer, and harnessing loyalty, every aspect of these is highly influenced by digital technology making the process more effective, and efficient. Incorporation of digital technology facilitates the process of customer experience audit, which further mitigate overlapping of multiple touch points, which enhances the process of each potential interaction, and visualizing.
Figure- Mapping out, and visualizing the flow of interaction of customers
(Source:https://www.mackenziecorp.com/6-steps-of-customer-journey-mapping/)
Prioritizing the company’s touchpoints by the level of influence, and interaction frequency
In this process the management needs to step back, prioritizing the customer persona, it is essential to obtain at which step in the journey, consumer spend most of his/ her time, and by obtaining it, the organization should deploy more effort to improve that particular stage, and content of it. For example, the organization enhances the social media content strategy, and monitor, and keep track of website activity using AI, Machine learning, which facilitates the process of prioritizing the customer persona.
Figure-Prioritizing the company’s touchpoints by the level of influence, and interaction frequency
(Source: https://www.mackenziecorp.com/6-steps-of-customer-journey-mapping/)
Update, review, and revisit customer journey map
To see, and identify the customer relationship fluctuation is required making improvements, and adjustments to touchpoints, as the changing in technology innovation, is a continuous process, demand continuous monitoring on customer's interaction pattern using AI, Machine learning developed algorithms to retain the marketplace, and keep the dominance over the competitors in the market. Buying patter identification now become more reliable, and easy to indentify by incorporating the technologies like machine learning, AI, algorithm by digitization the customer mapping.
Strength and weaknesses of proposed customer journey mapping
|
Strengths |
weaknesses |
|
Omnichannel interaction between the customer and brand- by incorporating digitization in customer mapping, the customer journey is now incorporated with centralized system provided by the company that can save, and log data from all conversation with the customer. |
Complexity in identifications- Though digitization facilitates most of the stages in customer mapping however over dependencies provoke the management to consider the external factors like time-to- market. |
|
Productive- and time efficient- digitization enables the automation manual customer service process, which helps the company to saves time, and resources. |
Less appropriate in early stages- Process of digitization sometimes fails to incorporate the light weight tools, which make the customer mapping less flexible during initial stage. |
|
Future proofing against new provisions- with the help of incorporation of digitization company can ensure the never stopping customer service quality, by procuring data, and reusing those to fill out new procedures, and forms. |
Susceptible to journey biases- digitization sometimes make the process of alignment of CX strategy, vision more complex which makes the customer mapping less efficient. |
|
Improved customer experience- digitization in customer service framework enables the management of the company to update, and maintain their own data, and accounts by using verification, and identification software. |
|
|
Gaining competitive advantage- incorporation of digitization enables the management to introduce the workforce as a innovative workforce in the industry. |
3. Digital Customer Service Objectives of TK Maxx
Management of TK Maxx has incorporated Artificial intelligence into their web navigation system to facilitate the process of navigation for their consumers, which is supportive to build and maintain a good relationship with their consumers. There are multiple strategies they have incorporated into their customer service strategy, in this section we will put stress on two strategies which are automation, and customization, and will further link those with modern AI technologies, and the way they have included the technology into these strategies.
Automation
The main purpose of any business entity should be the mission of satisfying customers (Naumov, 2019, p4). Proactively addressing the customer issues is essential to build, and maintain a good relationship with the consumers. The inclusion of AI makes the process of providing customer service faster. To reduce the cost of answering repeated questions asked by the customer, like an exchange or return policy become easy to deal with by incorporating AI into the process.
Through a Chatbot using an etail setting makes the process of paying for a product more easily.
Customization
Standardization stresses the needs, and preferences of the masses, whereas customization stresses meeting the needs and preferences of the individual (Kasiriet al., 2017, p1). Most of the customers nowadays seek individual attention rather than standardization. Like TK Maxx can procure consumer's interest using AI to develop microsites and landing pages. Consumer-based product recommendations can be utilized to enhance customer interaction with sites.
4. KPI indexes to evaluate the performance of the customer service strategy, and the customer agents
KPI is used to evaluate the performance of every attribute within a customer experience strategy to obtain the best possible customer strategies that will enhance the overall experience of the customer.
|
KPI, and analytics |
strengths |
weaknesses |
|
Website visit- here the management can obtain the number of visiting clients into websites (Ahmed et al., 2017). |
Management can identify the performance of the customer service through CSAT score, repeat visits, conversation rate, retention rate, net promoter score, and time-on-site, digital experience score, which are the key factors to identify the satisfaction of the consumer. |
Some during providing the score due to lack of awareness, and incapable to rate properly based on these parameters can mislead the management. |
|
Communication through email- email sent to the clients, and customer during solving queries, apart from the number of emails sent to the customer, and email traffic (email CTR) (Patti et al., 2020). |
Click through rates, or email CTR can help the management to obtain the number of emails sent by the customer service provider which is very easy to procure to evaluate the quality of the service provided to the customer. |
However due to email traffic makes the process more complex sometimes, and relatively inefficient. |
|
TK Maxx app- number of customers, or audiences download the app from the app store. |
Procuring the data of the number of downloads an app has done can be a good parameter to evaluate the popularity of the app, and the number of users using it. |
However, sometimes a bad review on the app store can make a user reluctant to download it, and as it requires a memory space to install it on mobile, make consumers think twice before downloading. |
|
Social media mention- the number of views likes on an organization's pages on multiple social platforms (Carneinet al., 2017). |
This is the most effective tool that can be used in the procurement of data easily. |
The determining factors are the number of likes, and the number of views of the page, however, the views, and likes on pages are not significant enough to understand the pattern, and priority of the consumer, and also it can be easily manipulated. |
|
Customer service survey- this a complex, however more effective process to procure the feedback of the consumer (Patti et al., 2020). |
A customer service survey is a direct method to procure feedback about the experience the customer gets during purchasing, and acquired data are most reliable. |
The process of procuring data through customer service surveys can be more time-consuming and requires large human resources to perform it. |
|
Review site- the given review on the site about the quality of product, and service can be used to determine the effectiveness of the customer service process (Marquardt et al., 2017). |
Review on-site can be an effective parameter through which an organization can achieve the quality of the service provider easily. |
A negative review on-site can deteriorate the brand image also, and it can be spread among the others easily. |
The above stated KPI and analytics are very essential to determine the quality of the provided customer service to the consumer, and through addressing the quarries, and feedback the management of the TK max can obtain the required improvement to bring in to enhance the overall relationship with the customer, and brand. Using these KPI and analytics the management can acquire multiple performances matrix-like average response time, customer churn, first call resolution, customer churn, number of issues, top support agents, customer satisfaction, customer effort score, net promoter score, net retention rate, consumer retention, revenue vs. support cost, MRR growth rate, revenuer churn which is most effective KPI metrics through the management can align the customer satisfaction level with their profit, and further cost-effective improvement they can bring into to enhance the overall process (Gaffney., 2021).
Social listening is a concept that derives that every enterprise should address the need of consumers to enhance the overall customer experience which will be the key to the success of a company. Among them, two steps are included which are monitor option, and mention, and analyzing the procured information. Through which management can monitor the performance of the customer service provider, and finding the further option to enhance the overall process, and procuring data is the most effective tool to find out the pattern, requirement, and feedback of particular product, and service, and evaluation of it can reach the organization to develop the best strategy in customer service system to build and maintain the best relationship with the consumers.
5. Conclusion
In this writing we have tried to develop the best customer experience strategy for TK Maxx, the market is going through a recession period, due to the disruption of the pandemic, which has compelled them to acquire the best customer experience process to retain the marketplace. Customer experience always plays a major role in building the brand value of any organization, however, due to advanced technology, and increased accessibility of the internet has made the customer journey completely digitized, due to intervention of expertise is required to develop the best framework in customer mapping. In this writing, we have developed the best framework of the customer journey, and further provided the customer mapping, and the incorporation of technologies such as AI plays a major role to facilitate the process of purchasing for the buyers. KPI is the performance index that helps to evaluate the performance of the customer agents, and the services provided by them, evaluation helps the management to identify the requirement that is needed to bring in for improvement of the customer service.
Reference list
Ahmed, H., Jilani, T.A., Haider, W., Abbasi, M.A., Nand, S. and Kamran, S., 2017. Establishing standard rules for choosing the best KPIs for an e-commerce business based on google analytics and machine learning technique. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 8(5), pp.12-24.
Bascur, C., Rusu, C. and Quiñones, D., 2018, October. User as customer: touchpoints and journey map. In International Conference on Human Systems Engineering and Design: Future Trends and Applications (pp. 117-122). Springer, Cham.
Carnein, M., Homann, L., Trautmann, H., Vossen, G. and Kraume, K., 2017. Customer service in social media: An empirical study of the airline industry. Datenbanksystemefür Business, Technologie und Web (BTW 2017)-Workshopband.
Gaffney, J., 2021. Implementing key performance indicators (KPI) metrics in a warehouse setting., pp. 1- 21
Link: https://minds.wisconsin.edu/bitstream/handle/1793/80985/Gaffney,%20John.pdf?sequence=1
Kasiri, L.A., Cheng, K.T.G., Sambasivan, M. and Sidin, S.M., 2017. Integration of standardization and customization: Impact on service quality, customer satisfaction, and loyalty. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 35, pp.91-97.
Lemon, K.N. and Verhoef, P.C., 2016.Understanding customer experience throughout the customer journey.Journal of Marketing, 80(6), pp.69-96.
Marquardt, K., Olaru, M. and Ceausu, I., 2017. Study on the development of quality measurements models for steering business services in relation to customer satisfaction. Amfiteatru Economic, 19(44), p.95.
Naumov, N., 2019. The impact of robots, artificial intelligence, and service automation on service quality and service experience in hospitality. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Patti, C.H., van Dessel, M.M. and Hartley, S.W., 2020. Reimagining customer service through journey mapping and measurement.European Journal of Marketing. Vol. 54 No. 10, pp. 2387-2417. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-07-2019-0556
