Journey Mapping is an important component of any CX practice. I joined Chris Ward from MyCustomer on “Connecting The Dots” podcast. We talked about customer journeys and how the process helps people understand their customers better.
Customer satisfaction and NPS are useful measurements of business success, just as much as revenue and profitability. The reasons are obvious as unhappy customers are unlikely to buy again and even worse, they’ll tell others too. So, how does a company increase the chances that customers will rate their interactions highly and remain brand loyal? The answer is creating customer experiences leveraging proven CX techniques. If you are not familiar with journey mapping basics, I encourage you to read my other article: WHAT Is A Journey Map and WHY Create One?
As a refresher, the purpose of creating a customer journey map is to help design better products and services and overall great experiences. It is a valuable method to identify problems and areas of success as customers become aware, learn, buy, get, use, etc. While Journey Maps typically look visually different from one organization to another, they consistently enable you to empathize with how customers feel when interacting with a brand.
Who is your target audience(s)? What are their interests, needs, and wants? What obstacles keep them from achieving their goals? What are their demographics, such as age, income range, education? Where do they go to find information? Answering these questions and related ones often require research through informal and formal interviews and surveys. Leveraging internal data on current customers and insights from “voice of employees” (VOE) is valuable as well. (Learn more about persona development.)
A journey map helps to define key touchpoints and channels, such as: where will customers learn about your products and services? i.e. retail store, webinar, industry events. How do they receive communications? i.e. email. social media, sales rep visits, etc. This information provides insights as to why customers may or may not be satisfied and where pain points reside.
You want to put yourself in the “customer shoes” and identify the emotions they feel along the journey. To do this effectively, I recommend leveraging tools to guide you through the process. While there are many templates available on the internet, I like one that Carol Buehrens shares in her university classes. You can download a free copy of her journey map template below.
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Access a useful document to jumpstart your CX practice. Use this with your teams to design best-in-class experiences.
A journey map is an important part of creating better customer experiences. I’m glad you are here to learn about what journey mapping is and why it matters to achieve business success. To keep it simple, a journey map is merely a diagram that shows the steps customer(s) go through when interacting with a company. It is common to interact with companies in multiple ways such as shopping online and visiting a retail store. The need for a journey map becomes most important as the number of touchpoints increases and when the customer buying path gets complex. (more…)
