Mapping your customer journeys: Three points to keep in mind

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Aug. 6, 2018 | 15:00 nachm.

Mapping customer journeys is high on the agendas of CMOs and other leaders driving digital transformation and customer experience initiatives across organizations today. Almost 89% compete mainly on customer experience (Gartner 2016, Customer Experience Primer).

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With customer journeys being crucial to business strategies, companies still struggle to define these journeys and optimize them in their daily operations, as these figures show:
-44% of organizations think customer experience is too hard (Dimension Data 2017, Global Customer Experience CX Benchmarking Report).
-84% of digital transformation efforts fail (Forbes article).

Here are three points to consider when mapping customer journeys:

1. Which are the touchpoints that make up the journey?

Many organizations tend to focus on what happens when customers encounter the product or service itself, e.g. a vacation cruise or an insurance package. Yet they fail to define the whole scope of the journey. They don’t look at the big picture, the augmented view of the product. This might cover anything from the first ad customers see and how they engage on the website, to how sales reps communicate with them and the service and after-sales support they get.

If you’re an insurance business for instance, the customer’s motivation or goal is not just “buy health insurance”, but “stay fit and healthy”. If you take this enlarged perspective, you can spot gaps for improvement or even opportunities for other value-added services. You might want to engage with them before they even start looking for health insurance, perhaps making initial contact via fitness clubs or offering reduced premiums for those who regularly do sports activities.

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Look at the entire customer lifecycle to get holistic customer journeys in place.

2. Which touchpoints matter most and where should you optimize?

What drives satisfaction most? Here again, organizations often fail to understand what is truly important for customers. They consider a particular touchpoint big, but customers think otherwise, or vice-versa. For example, an insurer might believe that the underwriting process on the website is the most important element. However, through customer research, it finds out that customers complain most about spending too much time waiting to get answers from the help desk. The insurer then goes about building a customer self-service solution.

Some businesses might take a strategy of having fewer touchpoints, or shortening the customer journey so that customers move efficiently from one step to the next. However, consider if you should add touchpoints in key areas. For example, a health insurance provider might introduce direct sales without agents, but then customers, who expect lower prices, complain more as they notice insurance premiums rising each year, for reasons they cannot explain. So the insurer creates a new touchpoint in the invoicing process: it contacts customers a month before payments are due to discuss any changes needed and to make sure that customers understand the insurance package they have picked and whether this package accurately covers their needs. Thus, an extra touchpoint can help smoothen the journey.

Listen to the voice of customers and see what matters most to them, not to your business.

3. How do you measure the success of your customer journeys?

Thinking in terms of customer journeys tends to break the experience down into smaller individual steps. While this is useful when measuring and analyzing specific results, it can have some drawbacks, because these discrete metrics do not reflect the overall satisfaction that customers have with your brand and the experiences you are offering.

For instance, a health insurer might launch a multi-function app that does anything from locating the nearest doctor and submitting claims, to measuring heart rate and giving advice on quick remedies. It could measure usage rates of these different functions and collect valuable customer behavioral data. But beyond that, it should link these separate measures back to overall customer satisfaction, which is in the end the single most important metric to predict long-term success.

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Look at the big picture and unite the different touchpoints. One way to measure holistically is through the net promoter score (NPS), an index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s products or services to others. With one simple question, you get a predictive measure that tells you how satisfied your customers are and how likely they will return in the future.

Connect all the touchpoints and measure the experience as a whole.

Once you’ve mapped out your customer journeys, create great experiences at every step of the way. Optimize search so that customers can find you easily, give ready answers to their questions, provide them with everything they need to know about your product or service, before and after they buy. In other words, create effective content and build meaningful connections with your customers.