A customer journey map is a powerful tool that allows you and your team to empathize with your customer.
It helps put yourself in the customer’s shoes and take the guesswork out of decisions by understanding what your customers need, how they feel and what they expect.
The exercise helps generate customer-driven innovation by allowing you and your team to identify gaps in the customer journey and innovate to improve them. Common issues addressed in journey mapping are:
- Breaking down miscommunication between different departments
- Understanding the different needs of the customer at different stages
- Getting the company working together toward a common goal
- Aligning each customer touchpoint with your brand’s mission and values
- Creating a better experience that puts the customer front and centre
- Resolving or smoothing out issues on the back-end of the customer experience (systems and processes)
In order for your company to get the most out of the customer journey mapping workshop and become inspired to drive change and optimise the experience for your customer, we recommend the following tips.
Involve key stakeholders in the process
During the workshop, you want to include anyone in your organisation that can drive change at each customer touchpoint. This could include everyone from the CEO to a customer service representative.
The customer journey mapping workshop will help align all stakeholders to work towards a common goal. It’s important to ensure everyone involved feels comfortable to speak up and share their ideas. It’s a collaborative and innovative process, from which you will gain a lot of insight.
“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” – Steve Jobs
Know whose journey you’re mapping
It is important to identify the buyer persona you will be mapping. If you have multiple personas, you may need to conduct multiple customer journey maps for each persona. It is important to be specific and really get to know your customer. You can even use a real example of a real customer, and their real experience with your brand.
If you want to take it to the next level, some companies invite a customer to participate in the journey mapping exercise as well.
Embrace emotions
Customer behaviour results from their emotions about your services and products. Emotion is the critical element in customer loyalty. Just think of the restaurant you go back to again and again, or the tradie you always tell your friends about. You are a fan of these businesses because they make you feel special.
When you create a customer journey map it’s important to get in the head of the customer and understand the emotions each touchpoint imparts. Empathy mapping is a great tool to achieve this.
Identify the moments of truth
Every customer touchpoint is critical, but some touchpoints are more important than others. We can call them a “moments of truth” in the customer journey, where customers make the final decision to purchase. These moments are an invaluable source of useful insights about engagement: not only where they ultimately buy (whether in store, online, etc), but also where they find the information that triggers the decision.
While mapping, highlight these moments and identify your strengths and weaknesses.
Do more than map: understand, innovate and improve
While the journey mapping exercise is extremely valuable, the ultimate goal is to improve your customer’s experience by understanding what they go through at each touch point.
We prefer to use the 80/20 approach, where we start by identifying your most important touch points. Then we ask, how can we make this quicker and easier? How can we empower employees to make the experience better for the customer? What processes can be smoothed out to make this experience more seamless?
Create action items, prioritise and follow up
You and your team are going to come up with a lot of actionable improvements for your business during the workshop. It is important to identify all of the actions and prioritise them with your team. Ensure you assign someone to be accountable for each action item, set a deadline and follow up to ensure it gets implemented.
Do you think your business can benefit from a customer journey mapping workshop? Get in touch with us to discuss.
