Understanding the customer journey improves experience and growth
Case Study

Understanding the customer journey improves experience and growth

Understanding the customer journey improves experience and growth
Case Study

Understanding the customer journey improves experience and growth

Client background

Our client is a mid-sized manufacturer of innovative residential and commercial kitchen products including leading cabinetry brands, sinks, faucets, foodservice fixtures, water coolers, drinking fountains, and award-winning rapid bottle filling stations.

The business challenge

Our client was focused on maintaining and growing market share and faced competitive pressures from low cost manufacturers. It operated in a complex sales ecosystem and had limited ability to control interactions with its customers. In order to continue to manufacture and sell high quality, premium-priced products, our client needed to address these key issues:

  • Shifting customer expectations: Competitors had made fundamental changes in how they conducted business with customers. This was creating pain points and new expectations for how our client should engage with its customers.
  • Lack of control of the experience: With multiple sales channels, our client had limited visibility into and control of the customer journey.
  • Lack of understanding of the customer buying journey: Customers were looking for a great online experience with trustworthy vendors that were easy to do business with. The need to re-evaluate how our client engaged with the market in order to “get in the engineering specification and stay in the engineering specification” was top of mind.

The Baker Tilly approach

Our client realized that it needed to create a differentiated customer experience, uniquely targeting each player in the value chain, in order to retain its current customers and grow their business. To drive toward the goal of making customer experience “effortless, exceptional, and personal,” Baker Tilly used the following methods:

  • Voice of Customer Research: Collaborated with our client to identify key stakeholders, decision makers, and influencers in the value chain - architects, engineers, wholesalers, contractors, and rep agencies - and conducted interviews to understand their expectations.
  • Innovation Workshops: A series of collaborative brainstorming sessions were conducted to innovate around the customer experience - starting with how to create awareness of the brand all the way through providing customer support after purchase.
  • Experience Survey Assessment: An electronic survey was sent to customers and prospects to capture primary data about their customer experience journey. The data was plotted against the Kano Model to determine experience “delighters” that could provide differentiation for our client.
  • Current and Future State Customer Journey Mapping: The Baker Tilly team developed a current state customer journey map and an actionable future state journey map. 

Business impact

  • Our client now has a solid understanding of expected/desired experiences and attributes that its customers are looking for.
  • The workshops identified new delighters in customer experience, such as offering “spec packages” for common solutions and proactively meeting with architects in the early stages of a new project.
  • Kano Model data identified the need for more product support from our client, as well as training tools in conjunction with new product launches.
  • Six key customer experience initiatives along an 18 month actionable roadmap designed to create a differentiated experience and drive growth.
  • Upon implementation of its CX Roadmap, our client will be positioned to achieve significant growth as it improves the customer experience in a way that is “effortless, exceptional, and personal” for a variety of its stakeholders.
“Baker Tilly helped us understand our customers and customer journey at a level that we hadn’t gotten to before, which helped our organization think about customer experience in a more meaningful way.”– Director of Customer Experience

For more information on this topic, or to learn how Baker Tilly growth strategies specialists can help, contact our team.

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