If you’re committed to customer experience, you’ve no doubt been told that customer journey mapping is critical.
There’s a ton of resource out there to help you learn how to do customer journey maps, with a wide variety of styles and tools to make it easy.
The essential elements of the journey map are simple: a brief overview of the customer profile and needs, the actions or task that you are mapping and then a breakdown of what the customer is thinking, feeling and doing.
So why is it such a powerful tool? After all, on the surface, none of these elements are ground-breaking. You’ve more than likely been researching these facts about your customer for years. You’ve got research, NPS and analytics.
Everything in one place
The genius of mapping is that it brings all of your data into one place and forces you to map it against what your customer is actually doing.
Time and time again, when mapping with clients, one thing becomes immediately clear: what we think the customer wants and needs is inevitably NOT correct.
We’re missing pieces. We might know precisely what pages they land on, what content they consume and what they end up purchasing. But we may not understand why they do it or how they are feeling when they do.
Transformation using gaps
And looking at the gaps starts a powerful transformation : departments have to work together to collate all the sources of customer information that exist to find the answer. Perhaps NPS might fill in a piece of the puzzle but product marketing’s last round of research might be the other piece you’re missing.
By forcing you to look at the entire customer experience in the round, every department in your company sees how they contribute to the whole. And what might be missing: amazing customer service and next day delivery might not trump product longevity or colour choices.
Which leads to the ultimate reason that journey mapping is genius: it leads naturally to a discussion of opportunities for your company to improve customer experience.
- Where can you improve?
- What parts of the experience needs to be prioritised?
- Are there products and services that you offer that might address what your customer feeling or thinking now?
- Is there an opportunity to create new communications or even new products?
Feel the power
Simple on the surface, but powerful. You can of course, do customer journey mapping on your own, but it’s always better if you work across your organisation to produce them so you can challenge and push yourself and your company to be the best.