So big warning. Today, we're going to talk about back end operations. In many customer journeys, the purchase is a distinct and incredibly important aspect of the customer journey. Many times has complete pulled out as a separate stage of the journey. Why? You might ask. This back office stuff is so boring. What's so difficult about sending a bill to your customers? Give me about five minutes of your time and listen closely during this class. I promise you that if you really want to make an impact with your brand strategy, billing is an absolutely ideal way to promote your brand messages. First, let's take the typical approach to invoicing your customers. We've all encountered billing problems. Overbilling, mysteriously labeled items in your bill, inexplicable changes to various prices, problems with payment processing when the credit card system goes down, et cetera. Consider this simplified schematic. What is the first thing that jumps out at you? Of course, it's defined in terms of the back end processes, not in terms of desired customer experience, but the back end processes of invoice sent, account overdue, first overdue letter, second overdue letter. These are from the core perspective of the accounting department, but these are customer conversations, and are just as important as those during the awareness, consideration, use, and support stages of the customer journey. Each of these stages could provide a great opportunity to reinforce the brand as focused on the customers. Take, for example, the overdue payments. This might be a great opportunity to gain the loyalty of your customers, especially if they either as a company or an individual are suffering financial duress. When you are mapping out potential improvements at a customer journey, look at biling is a great opportunity, and change the way it's designed to reflect not your back end systems, but the very real and important customer conversations that billing enables. One company that had done some really interesting things with invoicing and its relationship to brand is Opower. Opower is a billing company that's now part of Oracle that had been specialized in utility billing. So utility companies, which are typically regulated, want to incentivize their customers to consume less gas and electric power. Opower created a billing system where you can see the details of your energy consumption and enables you to compare your own consumption to that of your neighbors. This uses quite a powerful human behavior, the pressure to conform. It also uses a bit of competition as a motivation. If you are consuming a lot more than your neighbors, you felt wasteful and incentivized customers to look for ways to reduce their energy consumption. Also, and this is really important, this enable customers to perceive the utility companies as looking out for their economic interests, but also looking out for the environment. In this way, the utility companies' brand message is enhanced. This is true of invoicing and billing, but frankly any other back end systems that the surface the customer touch points. The video game you bought, do you have to adjust many parameters and register before you can start using it? How well does a store manage the waiting lines where a customer is frustrated as they wait to make their purchase? For an online purchase, does the system remember the customer's preferences or do they have to fill in their address every single time? For customers of internet providers, how easily can they schedule the installation? How much precision can a company give on the delivery of the order products? When it will come, for example? For a purchase of enterprise software, how long does it take to integrate the software into the customer systems? These are all part of customer experience and they as such are really important opportunities to surface the brand's message. Unfortunately, they are often ignored. When changes are made to the back end processes to support them, they are often made not to improve the customer experience, but to reduce costs.
