CustomersFirst Now
Journey Maps that Trigger Action

Around twenty-eight thousand residents across 24 counties of Colorado were impacted in the unforgiving rampage of the 2013 floods. Kerri K. Nelson, who built the recovery office and served as the deputy recovery officer for the governor’s office, took the time to understand the citizens’ plight, their precise needs and led the effort to build an integrated recovery approach, complete with metrics and a long-term plan for the flood victims. Although a different ball game, she uses the same principles that she follows to a ‘t,’ as the president and CEO of CustomersFirst Now, a company that helps drive the financial value of customer experience (CX) initiatives with an actionable, linear, and metric-driven customer journey-mapping solution.

“The idea of journey maps has changed so much in the past 12 months,” notes Kerri. “Traditionally, customer journey maps have been pretty pictures with emojis; nice to look at and can go on a wall, but limited, impactful action is taken. To that end, CustomersFirst Now delivers a SaaS platform that allows users to create as many journey maps as they like, with up to twelve filters— including, but not limited to, region, product, persona, moments of truth and pain points. The platform enables CX professionals to define touchpoints and ‘moments-of-truth’—every customer interaction that has substance and value to the business. Being API-driven, the platform has the ability to gather data from each of these points of interest and build scorecards that are shared at an enterprise-wide level.

Kerri notes that albeit a number of specialties such as customer success, excellence, and experience popping up, the realization that customer are the prime competitive advantage has triggered an enterprise wide approach to CX management, more so, at senior executive positions.

CustomersFirst Now addresses the need to understand customer requirements comprehensively and make improvements at touchpoint and workflow levels. The platform adds context to traditional survey data and manages the creation, analysis, and action associated with the customer journey alongside the brand. The direct financial impact of performance of the sales, support, and product teams at each touchpoint and moment-of-truth allows CustomersFirst Now’s clientele to address organizational areas based on priorities. When corroborated with a scorecard that the platform delivers, this enables an endless number of users to participate in the grand scheme of CX management. In a B2B environment, where the interactions are generally low-touch, knowing and being able to act on high impact areas provide the much-needed competitive edge to companies.

Nevertheless, CustomersFirst Now believes that today, CX transcends the concepts of customer types, market segments, and industries. The journey map provided by CustomersFirst Now allows users to view the customer from a humanized standpoint, along with hard metrics defining a business outcome. To enable this change of perspective, Kerri and her team bring rich CX expertise and work with their clients toward defining the journey map, importing it into the software, building the right scorecards, and managing the actions going forward. CustomersFirst Now’s data science team provides the analytics necessary to corroborate the survey questions, the scorecard and its metrics, and the touchpoints with highest financial and reputation impact.

These consultative services provided by CustomersFirst Now assisted one of their B2B clients with various cross functional teams to better understand their end-to-end customers’ experience. CustomersFirst Now analyzed their customer survey feedback and conducted customer interviews to validate the interactions regarded as high value. Using the SaaS platform, the identified areas were then linked to a specific action and owner to improve. “Organizations are realizing that customer journey maps are more than a formal part of the marketing exercise,” concludes Kerri. “Our platform helps CIOs drive metrics behind each instance of customer interaction, changing the face of CX as we know it.”