What is customer experience journey?
Customer Experience Journey is defined by the events surrounding customer engagement with a product or service from start to finish. Customer journeys are shaped by events that often involve multiple touch points and can be quantified in hours, days or weeks, including make-or-break moments that determine whether the customer is willing to invest in your brand or walk away altogether. Onboarding new customers, upgrading products and services, or resolving technical issues are a just a few of the many critical customer journeys involving interaction with a brand.
While companies tend to focus on digital touch points along the way, it is easy to lose sight of what the cumulative experience of a customer, or Customer Experience Journey looks like over time. To reach customers, it is important to see the end-to-end experience they have with your brand, through their eyes. Mapping the customer journey is a critical step to understanding your customer, identifying what your organization gets right about them, and the ways it may be alienating them.
There are several steps to customer journey mapping, i.e. creating visual representations of the path-to-purchase. Identifying all of your brand touch points (for example, social media, customer service or phone App), then organizing them in an outline is a good first step. This list is the “framework” of your map that captures how customers interact with your brand. The next step is to find out what the buyer persona is, which helps to clarify who it is your brand is trying to reach and helps frame the conversation around that demographic.
What are your customer’s goals? Looking back at the list of touch points and the intelligence gathered during these interactions produces valuable data about customer experience, and what customers hope to gain from engaging with your brand. After establishing who your customer is, touch points and customer goals, the customer journey can be visually mapped out, from initial contact to final sale and ongoing engagement. The ultimate goal of customer journey mapping is to see the flow of interactions, from start to finish, in order to assess customer support, identify pain points along the way, and improve customer experience.
Customer Experience Journey mapping helps companies deliver better customer experiences:
- Discover gaps and drop-offs.. Customer experience mapping offers perspective regarding how a target moves through the sales funnel, and where they drop off. A significant drop off in conversion rates at one point along the customer journey indicates there is something preventing customers from continuing on to purchase your product or service.
- Identify pain points.Once a gap or drop off is identified, journey mapping can expose those strategies and tactics at each stage that are causing customers to leave the sales funnel. Whether you choose to build on a strategy or tactic, or abandon it altogether, this process can help identify where to focus resources and streamline efficiencies.
- Bring teams together.. Often teams working silos, which leads to poor communication and fragmented processes. Customer journey maps not only create a comprehensive view of customer interactions with your brand, they also bring teams together by providing an understanding of how each, working together, can best meet the needs of your customers.
- Increase engagement and build loyalty.. Often teams working silos, which leads to poor communication and fragmented processes. Customer journey maps not only create a comprehensive view of customer interactions with your brand, they also bring teams together by providing an understanding of how each, working together, can best meet the needs of your customers.