Customer journey mapping helps the company/brand to describe in detail the customer experience process by evaluating all of the customer touchpoints with the company/brand.

To build a successful customer journey map, one should walk the way of interaction with the company/brand in the customer’s shoes. This is a great way to feel the customer experience from another angle and potentially find insights aimed to improve it. A consistent customer journey will help to enhance a consumer’s overall experience from start to finish.

Imagine the situation:

You have lost or damaged your credit card and want to replace it. You can do it by phone or online. As a customer, you would expect the procedure to be fast, painless, safe, and without a hitch, whether you do it by phone or online. If your bank has accurately mapped their customer journey map, your expectations as a customer will be met. In other cases, you will file a complaint, spread bad word-of-mouth or even consider changing the bank.

The goal of customer journey mapping to make customer’s way smooth, pleasant, efficient, and intuitive. Homogeneous customer journey help to improve overall customer experience. So, in two words, customer journey mapping helps to create a holistic view of the company’s customer experiences and take action on improving it by changing business processes in case of gaps.

Is Customer Experience Relevant?

One can say that competitive pricing, product development, and innovation are the forces of business excellence. However, in the modern world of building customer relationships, businesses strive to build brand loyalty and affinity to retain revenues and bring new customers. Negative word-of-mouth can ruin the brand’s reputation in the modern of real-time marketing and leveraging technology.

How To Start Developing Your Customer Journey Map

Before you start the process of mapping the journey of your customer, you need to think of all the touchpoints of your customer with your brand and audit all the channels:

• Brand awareness (PR, advertisement, online presence)
• Consideration (email campaigns/direct mail, search engine data, landing pages, 3^rd parties support, social media presence)
• Purchase (mortar-and-brick stores/branches, agent/brokers, website, mobile application)
• Service support/maintenance (call center, web chat, social media monitoring/reviews, brick-and-mortar service centers)
• Loyalty (mailing, loyalty programs, Voice of Customer Satisfaction surveys).

Auditing each step is all about evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of each touchpoint of the customer’s interaction. The main criterias of success are to put the customer in the center of all interactions and remember that if the customers are having issues with achieving their goals using your product/service, they are probably about to become somebody else’s customer.

Can I Make Our Customer Journey Map Or Should We Hire A Professional?

In our opinion, a third party is the best way to audit the situation and to see the events from another angle because internal specialists may loose from their sight some issues because of daily routine. In auditing the processes it is always better to have a voice from outside and to see your organization with somebody else’s eyes.

Shoppers Confidential has experience since 2005  helping our partners to improve their holistic customer experience and provide a full range of services in the customer loyalty field:

• Customer Journey Mapping
• Auditing Customer Service processes through all possible channels (brick-and-mortar, online, phone, mobile app)
• Social Feedback and Reputation Management
• Customer Satisfaction and Voice of Customer surveys
• Crowd Sourcing Customer Feedback
• Customer Engagement via rewards in mobile apps.