Customer journey mapping can provide valuable insights which enable your business to grow and exceed buyers’ expectations. It enables you to tell the story of a customer’s experience with your organization from initial contact through to ongoing repeat business.
It might seem like a pretty straightforward concept, but once you get into it, a customer journey map can be a complex and multi-layered diagram that takes many forms. There are lots of reasons why a customer may come into contact with you, and they might not always be good. Gaining a clear understanding of every part of their journey and all the touch-points can help you improve your offering avoid unhappy or underwhelmed customers falling through the net.
In order to get the best results, it’s important to plan them properly and ensure they give you all the information you need.
Here we outline the five essential components of successful customer journey maps.
- Client personas
The whole foundation of your journey mapping exercise should be the customer experience. This is about their journey, not your professional opinions or goals, so use real customer data to create a realistic persona.
- Motivational factors
Use your raw data to identify the things that motivate people to come into contact with your business and explore both positive and negative interactions. Journey maps should have actionable goals, so use these different touch-points to think about how you can improve your service.
- Seeing The Big Picture
Good customer journey maps take a holistic approach to the customer experience rather than focusing on a couple of interactions. Looking at the entire lifecycle of a customer relationship will help you identify any gaps and get your entire organization working collectively, rather than in silos.
- Performance indicators
Customer journey mapping is not a quick exercise, so the time and effort you put in must have clear business objectives. Record your findings and build them into your business planning, setting clear milestones and KPI’s. Include things like customer loyalty schemes and satisfaction surveys, focusing on how they felt about particular interactions (e.g. did the receptionist make them feel welcome?)
- Layers of information
Visualizing the entire customer journey helps improve engagement and inform your decisions. Journey mapping is a powerful exercise because it enables you to build a whole range of information into one big picture. You can focus on different elements according to your audience; board members might be more interested in KPI’s whereas customers might want to focus on special offers or the complaints process. This is one of the few cases where you can include multiple layers of information that will appeal to different people.
To find out more about how to use customer journey maps to inform your business decisions, contact Ethos today.
