An interesting infographic highlighting the business benefits of Customer Journey Mapping. Most customer relationships are far more complex than what meets the eye, especially because so many opportunities for engagement exist than ever before. Not every consumer goes down the same path, which is why it is so important to be able to personalise each journey.
By mapping the customer journey, brands get a high-level overview of a company’s customer experience at various touch points.
Once created, this adaptable tool can be applied to both products and services, in addition to in-person and online interactions.
It’s typically a team effort among several departments, such as design, sales, marketing, and customer service – any part of the business that’s involved in a touch point. It can take weeks to develop successfully.
Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping
The goal is to understand the customer’s point of view – what they’re feeling, wanting, or doing – and then use that insight to identify opportunities for improvement, minimizing friction and maximizing acquisition and retention.
Customer journey maps make it easier for teams to assess the experience perceived by the customer as opposed to only measuring the actual success of customer interactions.
A summary of the key benefits of Customer Journey Mapping and drawing up Customer Journey maps would be:
- Customer Journey Mapping helps you better understand your customers.
- Identifying operational inefficiencies can be a quick win for customer experience leaders.
- Customer Journey Mapping helps everyone understand issues and address them.
- Customer Journey Mapping helps you discover opportunities.
- Provides a single cross business unit view of the experience delivered by all customers facing functions.
- Defines key enabling requirements (skills, data, processes, measures, etc.).
- Highlights areas of importance (where effort should be applied) and areas not valued by customers (so costs can be optimised).
Asking the question, “can journey maps be used as single-use tools as well as reusable assets?” Forrester gives an example of one company who mapped their complaints journey, but in doing so have managed to reduce complaints by 18% and increase compliments by 44% in one year. The results were so good, the company then created an interactive tool based on the journey and lessons they learned and applied it across the organisation.
