Today’s organizations are challenged with the task of getting into the minds of their customers.
Why?
Because consumers now have access to a plethora of information, it’s difficult to pin down the exact moment they began to interact with your product or services. Consider this: 56% customer interactions are part of a multi-channel, multi-event buying journey.
The challenge most organizations face when creating meaningful interactions with their customers through digital channels stems from not having a clear grasp of their customers’ journey within their product or application.
With an increased demand from customers for quality interaction and resources, traditional approaches are no longer effective. Organizations are being forced to be innovative and provide consumers with custom-tailored experiences.
How can this be done? The most common solution is to create a customer journey map.
What is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map is a visual tool that outlines how customers interact with a brand. The map’s purpose is to visualize how your customers experience the product and service along the way so that you can understand of what motivates your customers, explore their needs and pain points, and design a better user experience for them moving forward.
Customer journey mapping combines two powerful instruments: storytelling and visualization. They are essential to the process because they effectively convey information in a way that is memorable and concise – creating a shared vision.
Why is a Customer Journey Map Important?
1. It creates a customer-focused mentality throughout the company
As your company grows, it can be difficult to ensure all departments are as customer-oriented as your customer service teams.
Break down these silos.
Customer journey mapping acts as a tool that facilitates cross-department conversation and collaboration. Creating clear customer journey maps will align and unite your organization on one common goal: exceptional customer experience.
2. It helps to identify new potential target customer bases
If you aren’t already creating customer journey maps, chances are you’re probably missing key information about your target groups. Exploring and mapping out the motivations, needs, and pain points of your audience will not only help you target your customers more specifically but also potentially can reveal a new type of customer to target.
3. It refocuses company perspective
Letting internal processes and systems drive decisions that impact customer journeys can often hide important details about the experience. By mapping out the customer journey, your organization can improve their understanding of what is interesting and helpful to your customers and create products or services in accordance.
Learn More: Customer Journey Mapping: How to do it like an expert
4 Signs That You’re Doing Customer Journey Mapping Like a Pro
1. You’ve segmented your customers
Not all customers go through the same journey.
As mentioned earlier, customers have access to a wide range of information about your product, services, and organization. This means that each individual customer will likely have a different path, different touchpoint, and different experience when first interacting with your organization’s information.
A one-size-fits-all approach is not enough.
Since you already have established your target audiences, you can further segment them based on key demographic and psychographic information to create personas. Creating unique customer journey maps for each persona will help you visualize and understand what path your “person” will go on. Mapping out each journey will clarify the process and shed light on previously missed touch-points.
2. You’ve looked at the whole customer lifecycle
The path a customer takes to interact with your organization’s products or services will vary from person to person. Customers have greater control over their own journey because they can now access the information in multiple ways. In additions, customers control how long it takes for them to make a purchase decision.
Because of multichannel access, it is crucial that you keep in mind all of the potential routes a customer could have taken to land on your organization’s product or service. You customer journey mapping needs to identify the potential needs of the customer at any point of their process.
3. You manage customer experience cross-functionally
Cross-functional collaboration is key to breaking down organizational silos and getting buy-in across the organization. Collaboration will facilitate assignment of owners along each stage of the mapping process. This will ensure all stakeholders are involved and all details are acknowledged.
The customer journey map must be shared across the organization. This will create a common narrative that will dictate the customer’s story.
4. You prioritize the allocation of improvement efforts
Nothing is ever perfect, so improvements are made continuously to fit the evolving experience. Customer journey maps need to reflect any changes that are made to the organization’s products or services because it will alter how a customer interacts with the new information.
Mapping should be data-driven. The more data you have in your map, the better you’ll be able to analyze the journey and prioritize improvement opportunities. Your map will always be in a stage of continuous improvement. Allocating time and effort to making appropriate changes will improve its success and maintain a good customer experience.
