What is customer journey mapping?
Customer journey mapping is now one of the most favorite tools for businesses to visualize their customer’s experience. Customer journey mapping helps companies view their business from a customer’s point of view. In other terms, customer journey mapping can be defined as an illustration that details all of the touchpoints at the organization that a customer comes into contact with as he/she attempts to achieve a goal and the emotions and experiences that they encounter during that journey. Customer journey mapping is a great way to identify the common customer pain points, ways to improve the customer experience and define what customers, and prospective customers, need in order to complete a purchase.
Our experts can help you create accurate customer journey maps to analyze customer behavior in real-time,
Tips for customer journey mapping
Identify the right customer touchpoints
One of the most fundamental steps in customer journey mapping is to identify the touchpoints through which the customers interact with the organization. It is vital to identify both the minor as well as the major touch points. Let’s take the example of a car showroom, the minor touchpoints here are the customer walking around the lot prior to being greeted by a salesperson or when the car is delivered to the customer after the sale is complete. Major touchpoints here include taking a test drive or sitting down at the salesperson’s desk to negotiate the final deal. An ideal customer journey map must include every touchpoint from the marketing phase to post-sale follow up surveys.
Distinguish onstage and offstage factors
Onstage refers to those factors that are visible to the customer, whereas offstage refers to the activities that go behind the scene. Customer interactions with the salesperson is an action that occurs onstage, however, the billing procedure can be considered as offstage. The offstage actions often have an impact on the onstage experience of the customers. It is vital to distinguish offstage actions from those that are onstage or customer-facing, this will help separate the customer’s actual experience from the operations that support it.
Feedback from all organizational levels
Getting the feedback from as many stakeholders as possible ensure that companies truly understand what happens at each touch point. This data gathered can be used to add a qualitative layer to the journey map. It is not just important for companies to map what happens, they should also map how they are executing the service delivery. To understand the customer experience at different touchpoints better, organizations must understand what is happening in each touchpoint in detail.
Set clear goals
Customer journey mapping is an excellent technique for organizations to identify the gaps between customer expectations and the actual experience that they encounter at various touchpoints. Customer journey mapping also help identify areas of improvement and communicate the “why” and “how” with employees across channels, silos, and functions. This means that mapping the journey should help lead to specific actions. These actions must improve the experience and drive the ROI to justify the effort and increase internal support.
Make insights actionable
It is essential for companies to ensure that the insight or data that they have gathered about customer journeys exist in a way which enables them to take real-time, live action in response to individual customer needs. Businesses must not only be able to create customer journey mapping, they must also be able to apply that insight at the right time. Taking the necessary action helps organizations build better relationships with their customers and ensure better customer journy mapping.
Single customer view
Rather than keeping data in separate systems, the data must be brought together into one unifying layer which can analyze all of the customer data at once. This would also empower the teams in the organization with a single view of the customer, right across the business, so everyone has the same view, and have complete access to the customer insights. This enables a better customer journey mapping process.
Gain more insights on Infiniti Research’s customer journey mapping solutions by requesting a free brochure.
