Customer Journey Mapping is a technique or service to capture every individual customer’s journey or personas in and out. It implies, mapping experiences, for eg. in a shopping scenario it would mean a detailed study of interactions/experiences at every touch point of shopper journey right from the thought of buying to the final purchase and beyond.
As a whole one can say, mapping the customer journey is like knowing or understanding the gesture and process flow of every department on the reaction/query of the customers. A customer journey map is a story about the customer’s experience, every journey is a persona that needs detailed study to understand how customers are dealt with. Journey Maps detail perceived offered experience vs reality, helps the organization to work upon them and opens the doorway to future possibilities.
The key areas where customer journey mapping focuses are:
- All the touchpoints where customers can interact with the organization
- Diverting the light on particular customer needs in the customer sales funnel
- Identifying the current flow of journey.
- Comparing the ideal journey with the as-is journey
- Highlighting the priorities
- Channeling the efforts and finance in the right direction
What is a customer journey map?
A customer journey map is a tool that is used for understanding the customer’s experience throughout and is created on the basis of research and capturing the customer journeys. Every customer journey is special and unique. No two journeys or journey maps can be copied or created on the basis of other. These journey maps can be generalized only to understand the common points of every customer journey and collating the required areas of improvement, opportunities and analysing the gaps.
Creating customer Journey maps
Customer Journey Maps are organizational effort led by the CX teams. People from different departments, including the ones who are not directly in contact with the customers but their decisions will impact the customers and the ones who know the customer journeys and are in direct contact with the customers must be involved in creating a customer journey map.
Extracting the best from customer journey mapping
The map designed must be so illustrative that it even defines the potential opportunities and hindrances. And to make it happen it has to cover all the channels wherein the customers interact with the organizations like your brick and mortar store, social media channels, TV ads, call center etc. If the customer connects with you then he/she is most likely to be connected till the post-purchase journey and beyond. Analysing such descriptive areas of customer purchase cycle can easily provide the main opportunity areas that require to be enhanced.
How does customer journey mapping help?
Focus on varying consumer behavior
Consumers today are demanding, their demands are more towards digital transformation and customer journey mapping helps in predicting these changes and variance. More or less it guides the organizations to be on the path that customer wants and do not make any obsolete or out of the way decisions. If some decisions are necessary to be made in enhancing the customer experience and you need a proof to make it happen, then, customer journey mapping is the biggest and the strongest way.
Benchmarking your own channels
Omnichannel customer experience is a must today and the customer journey map helps in benchmarking your own channels, their services, processes and products. For instance, if the customer was easily able to buy a product from your online store and is facing issues like long queues, delays or unavailability of the product when purchasing from the brick and mortar store, then such things are highlighted through journey mapping. This identification enable you to bring all your customer touchpoints to the same level.
Know the increasing touchpoints and keep a check
As we are moving towards the digital era, therefore, the number of touchpoints for the customers to know, search and evaluate about any organization is increasing. Understanding these evolving techniques to know how the customers are using them and for what all purposes, is important. With an increasing number of touchpoints, increases complexity which becomes a challenge and handling them all is where customer journey mapping and maps become necessary. A properly created idea of journey mapping identifies the minutest of touchpoint that could impact the customer experience and helps in locating the gaps and management.
The right customer journey
Journey maps should be based on truth and not fantasies. It needs to be included with what is real and is happening within any shopping process. This can be done by evaluating and analyzing the existing researches. To add more insights and facts additional researches need to be conducted that will make the data more quantitative.
Businesses today are trying to deliver omnichannel experience and to accomplish this customer journey mapping is enabling them to do so effectively. To make the customers as brand advocates it is important to provide them with such services and products or impress them with excellent support that they remain loyal and promote the brand in their social circle too.
Specialized third parties are working to provide effective customer journey mapping service and help the businesses to not only earn more customers but focus equally on the existing ones and serve better. ‘Customer satisfaction’ is not enough what customers are looking for is to be ‘delighted’ and get services beyond expectations. To predict their expectations and do something proactively is possible when customer journeys are mapped properly.
Shrishti is an enthusiastic writer and blogger with experience in producing quality content in various niches like tech, art, lifestyle, health, food etc. Currently utilizing her skills for writing and researching on enhancing customer experience, she is working as a content developer with a business consulting firm and loves to write poems in her free time.
