Customer journey maps outline the customer experience (CX) from initial contact with a business, through transactions and their relationship post-transaction. Journey maps can be a powerful tool to help businesses understand key interactions and how to improve each of them to deliver an overall better customer experience.
Bill McMurray, Managing Director, Asia Pacific and Japan, Qualtrics, said, “Many companies begin customer journey mapping projects without a clear understanding of how to maximise the information they are collecting. This can mean they lose opportunities to actually improve customer service and boost revenue streams.”
Qualtrics has identified three ways businesses can make the most of customer journey maps:
1. Identify ways to improve customer experience
Current-state journey maps give businesses insight into how customers presently experience the brand. These maps let the organisation identify pain points and the root causes of customer dissatisfaction. This means they can prioritise fixes to be actioned and better plan content and marketing communications to target individual customers.
2. Identify opportunities to innovate
Future-state journey maps prompt businesses to consider how they can give customers a completely new brand experience, rather than just making improvements to their existing CX strategy.
McMurray said, “It is important that businesses step back from their current CX strategies and use journey maps to identify opportunities to innovate. With a clear understanding of the corporate strategy, businesses can develop CX strategies for future product or service launches, and determine the infrastructure and capabilities needed to deliver on their vision.”
3. Drive organisational change to become customer-centric
Enhanced current-state or future-state journey maps that represent the experience an organisation would like for its customers, can be used to drive organisational change. These changes are not only systems and processes, but also employee attitudes and empathy for customers. The company’s ultimate goal should be to become a customer-centric organisation, which is essential to delivering excellent CX.
McMurray said: “Organisations need to have a customer-first strategy across the entire business. That’s the only way to develop ongoing positive experiences for customers. Customer-centricity is a continuous process. Organisations looking to become truly customer-centric must listen to feedback from their customers and act on it.
“For example, by using an easy-to-use, yet sophisticated platform, like Qualtrics, organisations can gather real-time snapshots of their customers’ experiences and determine where they can make operational and strategic improvements. By gathering this kind of feedback, businesses are able to continuously improve and deliver better experiences for their customers.”
