Consultancy
Customer-journey testing, for any business with customers.
We test your customer journeys at the moments that matter most and where your customer is least able to advocate for themselves — that could be a return, a fault, a cancellation, a complaint, a claim, a bereavement or arrears.
Vulnerable doesn’t mean incapable. A good journey assumes your customer can make their own decisions, and makes that possible for them.
For example: can a customer who bought a phone contract online cancel it online, or only by calling a number that sends them back to the website? Can someone return a faulty item without the receipt the till demands? Does a claim form ask three times for a document sent on day one?
We’re especially useful where automation has replaced a person, or now assists one, but it isn’t the only place we look. The question is simple: does the automation still deliver what you promised the customer? I use AI tools every day to build my own systems, so I know first-hand where automation helps and where it quietly drops the customer.
Efficiency should make the customer’s journey better, not only the firm’s. Every firm is using new tools to work more efficiently, and it should. That’s where we fit in: we test that journey.
Why it differs
Most failures aren’t automation at all. They’re processes nobody has walked through as a customer. Mystery shopping usually tests a single visit or call. We test the whole journey, from the promise to the moment it has to be kept. Compliance checks the file after the event. The companies selling automation test their own product. Accessibility testing asks whether a journey can be used, not whether it delivers the right outcome.
We test the journey as your customer lives it, independently of anyone who built it. I’m good at putting myself in someone else’s shoes, and that’s where I test from. I see the weak spot in a process before it becomes a complaint. I don’t stop at what went wrong: I find out what’s driving it.
When a process affects your customer, I find out who decided it should work that way, and why. A rule nobody can trace back to a person is usually the one doing the damage. I don’t take agreement as proof, including my own. A journey is tested by someone with no stake in it passing.
How it runs
Every business is different, so we agree the detail with you. It usually runs like this:
- Walk it as a customer would, using a test customer built from your real customers, not as the company policy says it should work.
- Find where automation has replaced, or now assists, a person.
- Follow the hardest path, not the one where everything goes smoothly. Read every letter, text and screen your customer sees, word by word. One wrong word can shut out the customer who most needs the help.
- Report against your own outcome measures, and show which customers get a worse outcome than others.
What you get
A plain written report: what fails, where, for which customers, and the evidence for each point. No softening, and nothing padded to look thorough. I’m pedantic about detail, and I start with my own. Every claim on this site can be evidenced.
If you’re regulated by the FCA: the Consumer Duty expects support that meets the needs of customers in vulnerable circumstances, and no unreasonable barriers to a claim or a complaint. It also requires you to monitor the outcomes your customers get, and to show where vulnerable customers do worse. I give you that evidence from the customer’s side of the screen.
Where this comes from
I start by watching the process work as it really does, before changing anything. As a retail manager I was sent to the stores that weren’t working, because I could turn a disengaged team round quickly. I ran teams of up to fifty, was acting manager of the largest-turnover store in Scotland, and was named Store Manager of the Year across the company. It’s still how I work.
Soon after qualifying as an adviser, I was handed phone scripts for talking to clients. I rewrote them so they worked better for the client and for the firm — the same thing I test for now.
Training in medicine taught me to take a patient’s history, explain why I’m asking each question, and reach a conclusion based on what that person needs — the part a customer journey most often forgets.
The first conversation is free. After it, you get a written quote before any work starts.
Tell me which journey worries you most, and I’ll tell you how I’d test it: info@alsper.co.uk.