Discover the Potential of Mapping the Customer Journey
In an ideal organization, customer experience is everyone’s business. Imagine if everyone in your organization experienced what it's like to be your customer at least once a year- to see what you do through your customer's eyes.
You would immediately feel the same frustration or satisfaction a customer feels. This experience would certainly help you identify the actions needed to improve the quality of your service.
Unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world, and planning such an activity every year for every staff member involved in the customer journey could be problematic. That is why many organizations only ask new recruits to undertake such an exercise, usually as part of their training. If you don't have the opportunity to explore the customer journey first hand, you will have to imagine it instead - to create a map of the typical customer journey.
Define Customer Experience Within the Customer Journey
Before mapping a customer journey, you must define customer experience:
It refers to the entire value proposition provided by a company to consumers. It is determined by all the impressions and emotions an organization provides to its customers during each interaction.
This encompasses the quality of its product and service offer and the quality of the customer relationship throughout its journey with a brand.
It’s important to differentiate customer experience and user experience (UX):
Customer experience is about the customer's relationship with the brand.
User experience is the relation between a user and a product/stage of the service.
User experience is specific, while the customer experience is global.
Include Key Information in Your Journey Map
The journey map contains clear descriptions of each step, namely:
The maximum, minimum, and average duration of each step.
A description of users’ expectations and satisfaction.
A list of the current deliverables you produced to meet these expectations.
Surveys are one of the main tools you can use to get the most out of your customer perceptions. Surveys and other sources of customer sentiment can then be aggregated through IT systems, which will allow for customer journey optimization - this is called feedback management.
Bringing together all these pieces of information, you can create a map of the customer journey.
Map One Customer Journey Per Customer Segment
As explained in this chapter's video, not all your customers are identical. Therefore, you may require a separate customer journey map for each relevant customer segment.
A customer segment is a group of customers defined by sharing common factors, such as demographics (age, gender, location) or observed behavior (what they’ve bought from you before or other interactions you’ve had with them). These segments can either be fixed (unlikely to change) or dynamic (where individuals move in or out of a segment over time).
Let's Recap!
CRM requires a precise description of the customer journey.
Customer segmentation equips you to deliver more relevant customer experiences and marketing.
Customer journey and customer satisfaction are intrinsically linked.
Now that you understand how to map the customer journey, you need to list the different steps and then choose the right data to collect. Let’s see how in the next chapter.
