In any business environment, customer centricity is not just aspirational – it’s essential. Underscoring every business process, it is the key to being relevant and successful. And it all begins with a customer journey map.
A customer journey map is a powerful tool for businesses to understand customer interaction patterns. In a digitally led, mobile-first world, personalization and mobility are key. The customer journey map puts the customer at the fulcrum of the organization’s thinking. It helps determine how mobile, social media and the Web are influencing and changing customer behavior. It demonstrates the need for the entire organization to adapt, thereby reaping rich dividends.
Although it is a simple visualization tool, the process of creating a customer journey map begins with understanding the customer, through customer-driven inputs. Customer journeys also vary in complexity. A customer journey could comprise a single transaction, such as the purchase of a ticket. More complex journeys could cover the entire customer lifecycle such as planning a dream family vacation based on an advertisement, to post-vacation feedback on social media and travel sites.
The 5 core benefits of Customer Journey Mapping:
- Helps develop an achievable plan to improve customer experience
- Enhances customer satisfaction
- Identifies operational inefficiencies that can be a quick win for customer experience leaders
- Ensures that employees most capable of solving customers’ problems are leveraged as effectively as possible
- Identifies key areas where you can differentiate your customer experience from competitors
Mapping may focus only a customer’s experience of a product or service or can be combined with the complex emotions he or she experiences during these interactions. The latter links how the provider is delivering a product or service with customer satisfaction levels, thereby allowing the effect of change to be quantified.
5 steps to creating an effective Customer Journey Map
- Step 1: Build your Customer Persona
- Step 2: Define the Behavioral Stages
- Step 3: Align Customer’ Goals with the Behavioral Stages
- Step 4: Plot out the Touch-points and Channels
- Step 5: Determine if Your Customers Are Achieving Their Goals