Jim Tincher

Member Since: 1st Jul 2020
Jim Tincher, CCXP, is a nationally recognized customer experience expert, journey mapper, author, speaker, and entrepreneur.
Heart of the Customer, the cutting-edge CX consultancy he founded, empowers companies to achieve sustainable growth, reduce costs, and increase revenue by driving customer-focused change, improving customer loyalty, and optimizing customer journeys.
Jim's authoritative guide to journey mapping, How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer?, is considered a must-read for CX-focused leaders. His next book, Do B2B Better: Drive Growth Through Game-Changing Customer Experience, is now available for pre-order.
CustomerThink, Engati, SupportBee, Feedspot, Influencer Marketing, LitmusWorld, and many others have named Jim a customer experience influencer to follow.
Founder & CEO Heart of the Customer
My answers
Maurice,
This is a strong article - thanks for publishing it!
I'm on record as an NPS doubter, but that's primarily because many companies use NPS without thinking. Last year, we interviewed over 100 CX leaders and found that nearly every UNsuccessful CX organization used NPS. It's not that using NPS was the reason for failure (successful programs did use it), but that those who were unwilling or unable to follow a disciplined approach gravitated to NPS because it's popular. This undisciplined approach led to low impact.
There is no one metric that works for every organization. The hard work is finding out what matters to your customers with your experience. NPS may do fine. But with some - for example, low-investment experiences - NPS is rarely predictive of outcomes that matter.
I'm also a fan of using analytics to predict NPS. There is a change management reason to use surveys, and they do provide diagnostic help. But, since most customers don't respond to surveys, analytics play a vital role in understanding the true experience.
The bottom line is that customer experience requires discipline. Successful programs do the work to discover whether NPS is predictive; if not, they use other tools that are.
Sampson,
While I agree with your approach, you make a number of contentions that I can't agree with.
Yes, quick wins are important. And yes, it's certainly possible to make journey mapping overly complex. But where do you find that "The Conventional CX always leaves out 'price' and 'product' in their customer journey maps?"
I don't know who "The Conventional CX" is - but a review of journey mapping shows that many do, in fact, involve price and product. Why wouldn't they?
Clearly, pre-sales maps don't show product (since they haven't purchased). And post-sales journeys don't show price (since the product is already purchased). But if you look at these maps, you'll see them addressed:
A blanket statement that maps don't include product or pricing assumes all maps are the same. Looking at some leading journey maps (such as some of ours found at https://heartofthecustomer.com/4546-2/) show that product and price are pretty common.
Other good examples:
- Adaptive Path's classic Rail Europe map (https://uxfindings.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/raileurope_cxmap_final-co...) shows both.
- Sarah's broadband map (https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f0...) is pre-sales, but does include pricing concerns.
I could go on, but most have stopped reading.
Quantitative research is good and important. But your blanket accusation of journey mapping is inaccurate.
Your challenges iwth poor customer experience efforts are unfounded, but your article has nothing to do with how journey mapping works. I recommend reading our survey on the current state of journey mapping at https://heartofthecustomer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Driving-Change....