Mapping out the customer journey helps you to understand how your customers expect their interactions with you to go, and whether or not the experience you deliver meets those expectations.
Customer journey mapping is essential since it allows businesses to discover problems and opportunities that they might not have recognized otherwise. Often businesses deliver well on components of the customer journey, but without a complete view, they can fail at different touchpoints. Mapping the journey – not just individual touchpoints – helps to frame the experience from the customer’s perspective. If you want to improve your customer experience, you must first understand their journey from beginning to end when they interact with your business.
A customer journey map helps you understand the steps customers take – the ones you see and don’t.
It’s impossible to improve customer experience if you don’t know the moments that they go through during that experience. When mapping out the customer journey, you are looking for the moments that matter. Ensuring these moments match your customers’ expectations of your product, brand, and service is the foundation of providing an exceptional customer experience. Because if you are not meeting expectations throughout their journey, it can have lasting effects on customer loyalty.
The Importance of Mapping Out The Customer Journey
Great Customer Experience Requires a 360 View
With a customer journey map, you can have a 360 view of the customer experience by gathering feedback at each touchpoint. This helps you understand how each touchpoint contributes to the overall experience. Is there a stage that was particularly difficult? Where did the service they received fail to match up to their expectations? Being able to pinpoint specific pain points along the customer journey means that you can step in and make improvements at the moments that matter.
Organizational Accountability
Journey mapping creates a general understanding for your organization about how a customer engages during different stages of the customer lifecycle, and the functions and responsibilities of the different departments in charge of fulfilling that experience. It also helps make sure that your employees are aware of any gaps in service.
Customers are often more inclined to engage with your organization when they understand the different roles and responsibilities associated with their interactions, so they can pinpoint who is available to help them. If you do not clearly define these roles and responsibilities, it can damage the overall experience for both internal employees and customers.
Improves Employee Experience
Journey mapping also helps employees better understand their role in the customer's experience. When your employees know what they should be doing to contribute to the employee's experience too, it empowers them to provide the service that customers need and expect.
Employees should be able to recognize experience gaps before they happen and communicate those possibilities to the relevant roles within your organization. By providing employees with clear instructions based on the customer journey, they are able to step in and help customers along their entire journey
Understanding Customer Expectations
Mapping out the customer journey also helps you to understand how your customers expect their interactions with you to go, and whether or not the experience you deliver meets those expectations.
If a customer expects certain information at a particular touchpoint but doesn’t receive it, it can impact their overall satisfaction with your organization. If you don’t meet these expectations, your business could appear disorganized and unprofessional.
Awareness of Customer Preferences
Understanding your customers’ preferences can help you to better meet their expectations. Some people don’t mind if they have to contact an organization for information, but others like to feel more engaged and want everything on hand as soon as possible. Mapping the customer journey helps you understand where their preferences lie and deliver accordingly.
Makes It Easier to Improve the Experience
A customer journey map makes it easier to identify opportunities to provide better services or experiences by filling gaps in the process or service. You will also understand what touchpoints are most effective for delivering your message. It also helps you identify where customers are having difficulties with your brand, and where to focus resources on improving that experience. You can then shift your marketing budget toward these areas of opportunity. What’s more, you will be able to meet customer needs at each stage of their journey, ensuring that you are delivering on their expectations.
Improves Customer Loyalty
High customer expectations are often met with disappointing service when they visit your business. If customers have negative experiences in certain touchpoints, they are much more likely to share that experience with others through word-of-mouth marketing, social media platforms, or even negative reviews. A customer journey map can help you identify touchpoints where your customers’ expectations may not be met. This can improve brand loyalty and the likelihood to recommend your business.
Improves Marketing Efforts
When you know how customers journey through your business before reaching out to your company, you can target them accordingly throughout that experience. You can help customers as they search for information about your company and how you solve their problems. You know where to provide helpful content that will lead them down the path towards becoming a customer.
By knowing where those opportunities exist, marketers are able to create products and services that meet those needs throughout the journey. This allows consumers to experience every aspect of your brand in a positive way, and strengthen the relationship between them and your organization.
Once you know where, when, and how customers engage with your business throughout their journey, you can better connect with them in order to create a better experience for everyone involved.
Connect with our CX experts to learn how a customer journey map can help your brand today.
