How OKQ8 Leveraged the Customer Journey to Identify Business Critical Customer Insights

The problem

Companies like OKQ8 have realized the importance of understanding their customers’ needs and expectations to sustain and grow their revenue and market shares and remain competitive.

As such, they have already developed a procedural framework in which CX (customer experience) is one of the main processes. However, this process still needed to evolve further and be refined to ensure continued success. Some of the initial insights were:

• A few customer journeys were identified and mapped, but they realized the need to map the most business-critical ones.
• They also learned they needed to define a company-wide understanding of “what customer experience is.”
• The company had already implemented customer-oriented metrics such as NPS and CSAT in some places. However, they saw the opportunity to align those metrics closer to customer experience activities.
• The team identified an opportunity to implement a Customer Experience methodology and develop necessary supporting procedures.

First, the CX team set out to identify the current situation. As one of the initial steps, it was vital for them to understand OKQ8’s current strengths and challenges in customer experience (CX). Based on interviews with several C-level stakeholders, they conducted a pilot to investigate the current Customer Experience challenges and how they could be addressed within the company.

The pilot

The pilot’s scope was one of OKQ8’s strategic business areas previously selected in collaboration with internal stakeholders. The objective was to identify critical areas of improvement in the customer journey and build a proof of concept for a customer-centric methodology.

They gathered individuals working within the field—numerous participants from e-mobility, sales, marketing, IT, and customer service. In the first workshop with everyone, they decided which area within e-mobility to investigate and which target audience(s) to focus on. Deep interviews were then conducted with individuals and companies from these target audiences. And based on that, the customer journey was mapped.

During the project and by using Custellence, OKQ8 was able to:

• Identify and map one business-critical customer journey as a pilot
• discover and analyze the customer needs
• Identify the most essential customer painpoints
• Identify the most significant business opportunities in the customer journey
• Map the organization’s ability to meet those needs
• Created customer journey maps that were internally accessible to everyone.
• The journey maps worked as a single source of truth and made it easier for teams to align on the customers’ pain points and agree and for stakeholders and teams to understand why changes were necessary.

The results

Teams had already identified some of these improvement areas in the customer journey. Still, they became much more evident during the project when validated by customer research and by mapping the customer journey.

By creating a shared understanding of the customer’s actual needs and the business’s ability to meet them, OKQ8 aligned the organization around 5 key customer insights that drive customer experience.

From each of these insights, several opportunities could be identified. OKQ8 also prioritized the opportunities with the most impact on customer experience and business results.

Additionally, the proof-of-concept process has generated interest internally and had a “pull” effect, potentially leading to increased interest in other company areas. According to Sandra Yxne, Customer Experience Officer and CX team lead, this is an excellent foundation for OKQ8 to continue leveraging these insights to drive positive organizational change and growth.

“Mapping the customer journey has been rewarding and has resulted in tangible benefits. Through a well-structured approach and in-depth interviews with our customers, we have gained valuable insights into the different phases of the customer journey for the selected target audience. These insights will be actively integrated into our ongoing work.”

Sandra Yxne, Customer Experience Officer at OKQ8. Sandra is responsible for OKQ8’s transformation into a customer-driven approach, ensuring overarching processes and business objectives are geared towards enhancing customer experience.

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