Journey mapping to drive CX success

Author:

Kathryn Birett
Marketing Manager

LinkedIn Profile

Customer Journey Mapping is the visual representation of your customers’ interactions with your business. It is an exercise to step into your customers’ shoes and view it from their perspective. It can help you and the team improve and optimise the customer’s experience.

To create a realistic Customer Journey Map, information needs to be gathered at each touchpoint. Directly asking customers what they experience can help identify both the critical and less essential elements along this journey (conduct online surveys, apply social listening, set up a live chat etc.) Some maps focus on pain points and negative experiences, even showing them in red and below a baseline, providing a strong visual of areas for improvement.

Three key reasons why Customer Journey Mapping is important today:

1. Customer-centric culture

A challenge faced by many organisations is to create awareness that everyone in the business contributes to delivering a positive customer experience (CX). Customer Journey Mapping brings customer-centric business goals to life with tangible inputs and outputs (e.g., mapping your service delivery process from a customer’s perspective). You can understand every touchpoint by adding detailed descriptions and facts at each step of the journey. Some businesses enrich their Customer Journey Maps by including documents, audio files, pictures, creating a hub of experience data. A process mapping tool can assist with organising internal and external stakeholder interactions with customers and what steps happen behind the scenes.

2. Activity prioritisation

Customer Journey Maps can clearly communicate your service delivery journey to internal and external stakeholders. When data is available, experience scoring can be used to help prioritise customer activity. Simply allocate a score (1 – 100) to each customer's experience. For example, the cost of the journey per customer, potential sales, contribution to business strategic goals, or even how many times the journey is experienced over a certain period. Using scoring, you can focus on those with the highest scores to be prioritised to be worked on, or even improved, first.

CX software model tools can help automate prioritisation of areas to improve at every stage of the customer life cycle. Action lists can be created to help your business define customers, align their journeys with pain points, identify room for product or service change, define a set of key metrics, and most importantly, measure progress.

3. Internal collaboration and alignment

Journey maps can help make it clear for businesses to see what needs to be fixed. The process of assembling a map is a highly collaborative one where employees can build empathy for the customer experience. This can help implement CX initiatives with more confidence and speed. Rather than focusing on processes, the shift to thinking like customers. It is different to process mapping as its customer-focused, discovers areas of improvement, and contributes to benefiting the customer.

You could have the best mapped customer journey, but failure to activate it or use it can result in it falling short of its primary goal. Ways to bring it to life:

Use it as a reliable resource for decision-making or strategy planning

Include it as a training tool

Seek opportunities to innovate customer experiences

Increase customer awareness and build empathy

Build teams to work on closing any CX gaps

Creating the Customer Journey Map is just the start. Develop it, work on it, and execute initiatives to drive CX success.

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alignment, customer engagement, customer journey mapping, customer success, cx