What is a Customer Journey & Customer Journey Mapping?
We define Customer Journey as every interaction across every touch-point that a customer has with a company. Every one of those interactions contributes to the overall Customer Experience.
At a high level a customer’s journey starts when they first show interest in doing business with you. At a more detailed, specific level Customer Journeys can become quite complex as a customer may go through many different journeys during the course of your relationship.
Here are a few examples of customer journeys:
- A welcome journey when the customer first joins the company
- Journeys around queries that customers may have with a product or service
- A complaint or returns journey when things go wrong or need to be sent back or replaced
- A contract renewal journey for a service such as insurance or utilities
- A cancellation journey when a customer wants to leave
Each of these journeys may take place in one or multiple channels.
The channels can include:
- Website
- Webchat
- Helpline
- Text
- Email
- Social Media
- Branch or Store
Each journey is different for each customer because they have different needs, different expectations and will experience different emotions at every touch point in the journey. However by studying the current steps your customers take to reach their goal you can establish the main journeys in your business and identify where there is room for improvement.
This is where Customer Journey Mapping comes in.
Why is Customer Journey Mapping important?
If you don’t know what your customers are doing, how they’re doing it and what their experience is like you won’t get the full picture of how your business is operating. You won’t be able to make the right changes to make things better for both customers and staff.
Walking in your customers shoes is fundamental to delivering CX Excellence and Customer Journey Mapping allows you to do this.
The CX Academy has identified six key benefits of doing Customer Journey Mapping:
- A Customer Journey Map will give you a clear and simple picture of how customers interact with your company
- Understanding the needs and emotions for different customers
- Seeing the overall flow of the Customer Journey from start to finish
- Focusing on individual elements of a journey rather than the whole journey
- Identifying key issues and pain points and removing them
- Providing a roadmap for you to deliver your CX initiatives
The outcome of all of these is an improvement in the Customer Experience which will drive growth through greater retention, increased sales, reduced costs to serve and better acquisition from advocacy and recommendations.
There will also be an improvement in staff experience as departments work closely together to create seamless customer journeys and issues and problems are solved.
We have summarised our full course module into a detailed guide that you can follow to create your customer journey. It will help you understand and choose the customer journey you will focus on first, get to know your customers and outline how to gather the right people from your company.
Get your free Customer Journey Mapping Guide here:
