With the rapid evolution and adoption of social media, mobile phone use and multi-channel strategies, the modern customer journey looks more like a tangled web than a roadmap. While these developments increase touch points with customers, they also complicate the relationship. But, when journey maps are optimized, they can guide customers to highly personalized experiences – translating to increased profits and brand loyalty.
Whether you make your journey maps with pen-and-paper, sticky notes or online applications, these 3 objectives will help you improve your mapping and customer experience:
- Share the Customer Journey Across Departments
- Troubleshooting the Customer’s Problem Areas
- Developing Targeted Campaigns and Strategies
The Problem: Taking Initiative
Unfortunately, many companies fail to capitalize on these interaction opportunities and limit themselves to traditional, outdated approaches to creating customer experiences.
We’ve seen this negative effect on a company’s bottom line, thanks to studies on consumer behavior. According to Segment, 75% of consumers become frustrated with an impersonal experience. 44% of customers said that a more personalized experience would make them more receptive to a brand’s service or product.
Put simply: customers who feel neglected or unimportant won’t hesitate to approach your competition at the first opportunity.
Keeping customers coming back, or better yet, creating voluntary brand ambassadors, is the ultimate goal of any customer journey. Mapping it out thoroughly will make the path to that goal much easier to navigate.
Share the Customer Journey Across Departments
The idea of the customer journey map is simple: create a diagram detailing every customer engagement with a company. Brands that offer more complex services or products will naturally have a more complex map. With a visual map that’s easy to share between departments, engineering each step of the journey will become straightforward.
You’ll have a visual aid to track every path your customers can take between touch points and departments, and it can be as broad or as granular as you need. This allows the brand to better relate to and communicate with its customers with consistent intentions and messaging. In turn, this leads to improved customer journeys and experiences.
By illustrating customer interactions, we gain a better understanding of the big picture, both in detail and as a whole. You’ll be able to see which departments are responsible for what touch points, and how best to manage them.
Troubleshooting the Customer’s Problem Areas
It’s not enough for a company to admit that “we have a problem.” Fixing problem areas requires answering some context questions, like what, why and when. Mapping out the customer journey allows you to pinpoint areas within the customer experience that need improvement.
Let’s say a brand is known for delivering high-quality and durable products. However, it also has the reputation for having poor after-sales service.
A good customer journey map can identify the part of the after-sales service where the company loses touch with the customer. It helps companies answer questions such as:
- Do agents need more training to assist customers?
- Are wait or holding times too long?
- Are automated responses and prompts too confusing and frustrating?
- How often are customer issues successfully resolved?
- How long does it take for customer problems to be addressed?
By answering these kinds of questions, a customer journey map will enable the brand to fix problem areas and develop strategies to improve the customer journey.
Developing Targeted Campaigns and Strategies
Customer journey mapping helps companies define and understand their customers better. This will allow you to see which kind of customers — or personas — contribute the most to its bottom line.
Customer journey maps can reveal how to approach each segment of your customer base. And for the customer of today, consistency is key. Using the insights from journey mapping allows companies to develop targeted strategies that can boost growth, maximize profits, and increase loyalty.
Journey mapping is a good start. However, it’s the customers’ unique insights and experiences that can truly optimize your strategies. Using journey mapping with some form of Experience Management application is key to making the best use of these insights. These applications can tell you how much or how little specific experiences impact the overall experience, and whether they’re worth your investment.
Consider metrics like the Worth Index, or Worthix for short. It can scientifically explain the impact that the smallest experiences have on the customers’ decision to buy or not. Is a long wait in line a non-factor, a small inconvenience, a deal-breaker, or maybe even a pivotal part of the experience? Insights like this can help you make powerful improvements to your experiences.
Conclusion
As customer preferences continue to change, customer journey maps keep companies abreast of current trends and needs.
Therefore, more informed customers means that service/product providers also need to step up their game, or lose their footing in a highly competitive market. If done right, customer journey maps are a win for the brand and its customers
If you want to learn more about how journey mapping fits into creating customer experiences, and the process as a whole, check out our free eBook below.
Meet the Worthix Content Team. We’re dedicated to bringing our readers value from the crossroads of CX thought leaders, industry experts, on-the-ground CX practitioners and top academics from around the world.
