Understanding the customer journey
7 steps to successful customer journey mapping
The truth about the customer journey
A consistent customer experience is key to articulating and affirming a brand promise. And understanding and optimizing customer journeys is the root of consistent CX.
Just as customer experience was once viewed solely in terms of after-sales service, the customer journey was once the scope of the marketing department. It reflected the steps a customer would take as that person discovered a brand, compared it against its competition and then eventually made a purchase.
However, in many business sectors and in many situations, the customer journey, and therefore the relationship between a consumer and a brand, doesn’t officially start until the purchase is made.
And of course, the journey itself is no longer linear, nor is the route contained within a single channel. It now involves online advertising and web searches, social media, website navigation, online chat and email support, automated systems such as chatbots and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems or customer self-service, as well as telephone support or face-to-face interaction in a brick-and-mortar environment.
The customer journey map is your guide to understanding CX pain points
Today, the customer journey is viewed as a comprehensive experience made up of every interaction a customer has while communicating — for any reason — with a brand over the lifetime of the relationship. As such, while marketing is still critical in attracting consumers to a brand and in articulating its differentiation, the customer journey now belongs to the organization as a whole — from sales and marketing to operations, customer service and IT.
Each step of a journey is a touchpoint and each touchpoint should be designed to help rather than hinder the customer in achieving an objective. And, the only way to understand these journeys and test whether they align with or alienate customers is through customer journey mapping.
A customer journey map is a visual representation of the most important journeys customers take to meet a specific need or achieve an objective. The objective could be as simple as making an initial, informed purchase. But how customers navigate channels and touchpoints in order to obtain information, find an answer to a question or resolve an issue are of equal importance in terms of consistent customer experience.
The customer journey takes a customer lifetime to complete
If executed well, a customer journey mapping exercise will highlight whether customers taking different routes to meet the same goal receive the same levels of service and arrive at the same resolution.
It will also highlight whether individual touchpoints are serving their purpose or creating frustration and, crucially, whether there’s an opportunity to remove certain interactions altogether.
7 steps to successful customer journey mapping
1. Set clear parameters
There are any number of potential journeys a customer could take while interacting with an organization. Mapping too many journeys and then attempting to operationalize the findings leads to confusion. Making too many changes too soon to how customer experience is delivered creates difficulties in identifying which perceived improvements are driving a positive change.
2. Decide who is taking the journey — and why
When a customer engages with an organization, that person is attempting to fulfill a need or meet an objective. Identify the most important customer goals and tie these goals back to customer personas that are based on both demographic and the length of their relationship with the brand.
3. Document and analyze each touchpoint on each journey
Are touchpoints customers encounter on the journeys in question helping them to meet an objective, or are they creating confusion and frustration? Support initial findings by leaning on AI to examine contact center data such as common contact drivers and speech analytics data. Are there any clear instances of interactions creating pain points?
4. Check internal processes
Examine the aspects of the organization that reside behind the problematic touchpoints. Are there processes in place within marketing or sales, within customer service or within IT that because of an inward focus are unintentionally harming the customer experience?
5. Create the map
The aim of this process is to chart existing customer journeys and then overlay them with the proposed improvements. A customer journey map can take many forms, but the goal should be to make it as visual and as unambiguous as possible.
6. Build a cross-functional team
The customer journey is no longer owned by the marketing department. The customer journey and the resulting customer experience belong to the organization as a whole. This means applying a positive change to the customer journey requires employee buy-in across a number of functions and a clarity of objective, hence creating maps and supporting documentation that eliminate any ambiguities.
5. Act on the findings
Once the cross-discipline team is established, engage them to make the necessary changes that historical data analysis and the mapping exercise have highlighted as problematic. Then establish benchmarks and metrics that can track if the changes are making a positive difference in relation to customer experience.