Below is an excerpt taken from Module 4 of the Professional Certificate in Customer Experience.
This module includes all the below and a huge amount of detailed information on how your business can create and utilise your customer journey.
What is a Customer Journey?
A Customer Journey is defined as every interaction across every touch-point that a customer has with a company. Each interaction in the journey contributes to the overall customer experience.
What is a Customer Journey Map?
A Customer Journey Map is a visual representation of the process a customer goes through to achieve a goal with a company. It includes every interaction a customer has at each touch-point for that specific journey.
A Customer Journey Map focuses on what the journey currently looks like – this is what we call the “as is”.
For each stage of the “as is” journey, you should look at:
- What actions happen – what is the customer doing?
- Which touch-points the customer uses – are they going online, or making a call, using an app or visiting a store or branch
- What the common issues and pain points are for customers? (by pain points we mean what are the barriers to the customer completing their objective, what annoys them and may cause them to abandon the journey, complain or even stop doing business with the company)
- How the customer is feeling at each stage – are they happy, annoyed, frustrated, satisfied etc?
It also includes how the journey can be improved – this is what we call the “to be”.
For each stage of the “to be” part of the Customer Journey Map, you should look at:
- What actions can be put in place to improve the “as is” experience?
- How specific pain points can be addressed or removed?
- How the customer journey can be simplified
What is Customer Journey Mapping?
It is very important that companies take the time to understand each journey from the different customers’ perspective and consider how the customer experience can be made as good as it possibly can be for them.
To do this companies need to walk in their customers shoes and map out every interaction at every touch-point along the customer journey for each different type of customer. This process is referred to as Customer Journey Mapping.
What questions do I need to address?
Before and during the process of Customer Journey Mapping, ask yourself the following questions. You need to answer honestly and always with your customer in mind.
Who is the Customer? – create at least one description and picture (persona) of the customer you are focusing on. Imagine the customer is sitting in the room with you and constantly refer back to them
What is the Customer Goal? – what is the overall goal the customer is trying to achieve?
What are the stages? –what stages of the journey does the customers go through to achieve their goal?
What are the Touch-points? – what touch-points does the customer use through each stage of the journey?
What is the current Customer Experience? (the “as is”) – what are the actions, pain points and emotions of the customer?
How do we make Improvements? (the “to be”) – what are the opportunities to improve the Customer Journey?
If you would like to learn more about Creating and utilising your customer journey, and receive our Customer Journey template, sign up to our next course: the Professional Certificate in Customer Experience
