“The first step in exceeding your customer’s expectations is to know those expectations,” said Roy H. Williams, the man well recognized for his Wizard of Ads trilogy. Every business functions with a goal to create customers who can create more customers. A recent study from the global market research company, Forrester suggests that companies should map their customers’ journey to capture peak points, to measure the CX drivers and to align operational metrics with their customers’ expectations. Mapping Customer Journey can define your customers’ experiences far better than any other method.
According to the 2018 customer journey mapping research report, nearly 71% was identified to believe that their customer journey mapping projects have led to an increase in customer satisfaction. Mapping the customer journey is getting more popular these days with better tools and practices. Combinations of a different set of tools help in visualizing the customer journey. The intention of using such tools is purely to expand the customers’ journey.
Key Benefits of Mapping Your Customers’ Journey
- Helps you to visualize your interaction with your customers
- Helps you to focus on specific customer requirements
- Helps you to sieve through the different stages of a customers’ journey
- Helps you to identify the gaps and weakness
- Helps you to identify the strengths
- Helps you to be proactive, innovative and contextual
- Helps you prioritize those aspects that have a huge impact on your business outcome
- Helps you improve customer satisfaction, trust and advocacy
To start with, you need to identify the scope and the components of mapping to understand the opportunities, the hidden threats, the strengths, the frictions and much more. Mapping them will allow you to gain business-critical insights and widen the concept of value.
So, what should you map?
There are three elements to consider here;
#Tracking the Past Positive Experience
GoodFirms, a leading research company recently cited past positive experience as one of the top factors influencing the purchase decision. In its study, the company identified nearly 76.3% as the support percentile for past positive experience. Tracking the past experience of your customers can be one of the key elements in mapping your customers’ journey.
#Understanding Your Customers’ Emotions
Whether your lead gives you a sale, leaves a feedback, or mentions your product on social media, there is some sort of emotions or sentiments connected to each of their action. Every aspect and every touchpoint matters to the company. After all, a good customer experience is the culmination of a series of connections that the customers have with the company and the subjective response they get from the company. Companies have to collect, quantify and analyze customer sentiments or emotions to quickly identify and eliminate all friction points.
#Turning Every Feedback into Action
As you know, your customers’ journey starts much before the customer actually makes a purchase deal with you. It starts much before and continues even after the customer experiences your product or service. Considering the market today as hypercompetitive with multiple touchpoints and multichannel, businesses need to follow every context of the situation to gain stacked wins. Gathering feedback at every touchpoint is a great way to enhance customer experience. Social media usage is growing phenomenally these days. According to the latest report on social media usage for 2018, Facebook, Youtube, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger tops the chart and the number of social media users is indicated to have crossed 3 billion globally. Gathering feedback is easy via social media. You can also take the feedback via online or in person and even use the net promoter score.
How do you go about mapping?
There are different ways to map your customer journey. Two proven methods in these days are: to use analytics and to make the best of AI and machine learning.
#Using Advanced Analytics
Advanced customer journey analytics can quantify both the touch point and the experience offered by the company. Such analysis can be attributed to key transactions, customer segments, period, geographical region, products and much more that are critical to the customer experience. Parsing the resulting data can help the company understand the currents beneath the surface and will indicate the company the path to progress. There are different ways to model the customer journey data. Several advanced analytics tools are available that help can promote service innovations by allowing a company to monitor data including customers’ social engagement data. Key advantages of such analytics are to master capabilities that include; proactive, contextual and innovative.
#Taking advantage of the Artificial intelligence
Several companies have been investing and specializing to understand the journeys their customers take to optimize their experience along each of their touchpoints. One the prime use case for AI, as indicated in a market guide is the use of historical customer behaviour data to gain actionable insights on customer journey breakpoints, unhappy customers, high-effort journeys, probabilities and specific product-based challenges. Applying AI can help companies to get into a consistent practice to understand several challenges well ahead and master the art of serving better.
Customer Experience is Directly Linked to Business Outcomes
Companies that create exceptional customer experience are the ones that march ahead with pride. Creating a positive experience requires a company to gather collective experiences and interactions that customers have with the company. Towards this, mapping each move of your customers’ touchpoint is essential. Journey mapping is not a onetime process. It should be done frequently to identify the key moments of truth that contributed to a good or bad customer experience. Go ahead and get to know your customers this way.
Meenakshi Krishnan is a content consultant at OpenXcell, a Mobile App Development Company rated consistently as the pioneers in India and USA. A techie at heart, Meenakshi is passionate about the start-up ecosystem, entrepreneurship, latest tech innovations, and all that makes this digital world. When she is not writing, she loves to read, cook and paint.
