The customer journey map is an essential tool to help align departments and create effective brand experiences. The purpose of one is to make sure you understand all the touchpoints that your customer has with your brand, as well as the action you want them to take. Creating a customer journey map can help answer some simple business challenges that you might be having - some of which are prohibiting you from reaching your goals.
1. Creating a Seamless Omni-ExperienceToday's mobile customer is complex. It is apparent that their journey with your brand is cross-device, cross-channel and cross-department. I believe that this experience should be called "omni-experience" not "omni-channel." What does that mean? It means that your customers know they can engage with your brand through multiple channels. They expect them all to be personalized and pick-up where the last experience left off. Your customers expect one seamless experience.
Ensuring you're creating this omni-experience for all of your customer segments begins with a well defined Customer Journey. This will help you to identify the experience gaps and pinpoint where your customers might be getting frustrated or dropping off. Clearly defining the customer journey can help to increase how many people are going through your conversion funnel. It is important to make sure they have the reminders, engagements and notifications to complete the desired goal.
Say you just launched a new mobile app that serves as the primary destination for your customers. All your marketing efforts are pointing to this app. You are driving acquisition and engagement begins to spike. The issues comes in when your customers begin reaching out to Customer Service with a new set of issues. "The app isn't saving items I put in my cart earlier today when I was shopping on my home computer." "The Facebook coupon isn't showing in the app."
If your Customer Service team isn't involved in defining your Customer Journey map, they might not know how to best help your customer. Make sure they are sharing frequent customer frustrations and where in the journey they get stuck. This will ensure that they are not only prepared to help, but to give you additional insights that help fill in the Journey gaps.
The more touchpoints, the more data. This might be exciting to people like me, but to some, large amounts of data can be overwhelming. It can be unclear as to how to tell a full customer story with that data.
Your new Customer Journey map will help to define what data is important to you (or to each department) based on the channels identified, the actions you want to happen at each stage and what your overall conversion funnel looks like. Because your Journey shows both qualitative and quantitative goals, you can now report on the two and share the actual results to better pinpoint gaps and drop-offs.
Your Customer Journey will get better with time. It can be as simple or as complex as you need. Just make sure that once it is created you continue to update it and reference when faced with challenges. Your answer might already be documented and require a simple fix. Having all departments aligned on what the optimal customer experience should be, and what they might go through on various channels, will be extremely beneficial and your customers will thank you for it.
Want to start your own customer journey map? Kerry Bodine does a great job of explaining how to get started at the end of this video. How do you think a customer journey map could help your business?
