What Is Customer Journey Mapping?  Why is it Important?

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Customer journey mapping helps businesses identify and understand what consumers want and care about and how they shop to get it.  Businesses use it as a tool to illustrate visual end-to-end customer experiences and to correct deficiencies, train/re-train employees, improve customer service, and build customer loyalty.  The mapping process traces every nuance and touch point of customer engagement.  In fact, two-thirds of the touch points (the way in which customers interact with the businesses: chat service, email, face-to-face, phone, etc.) are initiated by the customer.

Online and brick-and mortar businesses have equally compelling reasons to develop a mapping system, however, they will be starkly different from one another.

Elements to consider when developing a customer journey mapping system:

>  Understand who your customers are.  Create persona profiles that describes their goals, behaviors, and acceptance tolerance to welcome new ideas about your products/services.  Understand what makes them different from other customers.  This exercise may reveal that your company has upwards of 15 personas.

>  Step into the customer’s shoes.  In each stage of every touch point, measure their emotions—likes/dislikes about your organization’s products/services.   Capture this information by using metric technology such as Net Promoter Score (NPS).  NPS can even measure the company’s level of effort and attempts to satisfy the customer (yes, you want to know that !).

>  Demonstrate the customer’s interaction with all of the company’s departments/units/divisions.  Illustrate their current touch points and be prepared to predict how they will interact with your company in the future.

At the outset, this exercise can be cumbersome and time-consuming; however, critical research such as this is worth its salt and worth conquering the ever-present challenge of giving clients what they need, want, and expect when engaging in commerce…an enriching experience.

If your company already has a customer journey mapping system, tell us about it and let us know how it is working for you.

Have a great day and continue to be exceptional !