The journey of the customer starts way before they onboard and continuous even after they leave. We can divide the journey into 3 major parts: Presales, Sales, and being a customer. Mapping the customer journey will help you in identifying the customer pain points, opportunities to increase customer engagement, and help in providing an optimal experience.
Defining the scope of work & goal
The first most important step for an expected outcome would be defining the scope and goal. You might create the customer journey mapping for your organization for different reasons like, to identify the gap/frictions or to identify the opportunities to test your new services or product.
Start your first step by defining the scope of work clearly. For example, you might have different services or product offerings with a different customer base. Focus on the most straightforward service or product and start working from there.
Nextly, define the goal of doing this activity by clearly stating the objective and expected outcome. So that you will have a clear path to focus on.
Customer Persona
Now, it’s time to define the customers. You might have a different group of customers for a particular service. So, start segmenting them based on various factors such as age, profession, gender, etc.
Create Personas
Creating personas can be done in two ways,
1. In case if you don’t have the customer data or real one, you can create the ideal proto persona by assuming the background details.
2. If you have the data and real customers then start interacting with them to understand them and collect insights.
While interacting with the customers, get to know about them from their perspective as in observing the obstacles/challenges that they are facing while purchasing/interacting with your service or product, or brand. Ask them to honestly open up the hard truth about their experience with the brand. The more open they are, the more you get to know about the problem. Also, don’t ignore the rest of their world because you just focus on your brand.
Tips — While documenting, use the “I” statement where it makes a huge difference. (For example — I purchased the product through a mobile app instead of the customer purchased the product through the app).
Collect and review data
Customer data are very crucial for journey mapping, You can collect the data in different possible ways by doing surveys and interacting with the customer front employees.
A different survey, which would help is
Customer Satisfaction survey is also known as CSAT:
CSAT is a type of survey mainly used to gather customer feedback at the end of performing each activity which will help in measuring the effectiveness and in fine-tuning the particular part.
Few examples,
1. Ask them whether they have liked the article
2. Once after solving the ticket ask them how much they are satisfied with the solution.
Net promoter score (NPS):
NPS is mainly used to measure customer loyalty.
For example
1. How likely are you to recommend our product to someone?
Based on the customer’s responsibility, we can come up with data on how satisfied they are with features or experiences.
- Promotors (9–10) are loyal who will keep buying and refer others, fueling growth
- Passives (7–8) are satisfied but customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings
- Detractors (0–6) are unhappy customers who impede growth through negative word of mouth.
Other most common surveys like transactional surveys, social media comments, feedbacks, and tickets can be taken into account.
Get the Right Team
Forming the right team will lead you on the right path. Customer journey mapping is a group interaction process once after defining the customer and reviewing the data. Form the team by inviting people who are in direct contact with the customers, who are more cared about the customer experience, and who are most connected to the experience of the customer.
For example,
- Executives (CEO, CXO, CMO)
- Receptionist, front line workers, cashier, sales rep, and customer support executive, etc.
The Thumb rule of ideation is to highlight the moment of truth and to accept the real facts about customer experience towards the brand.
Touchpoints & Emotional Mapping
While mapping the experience, including a hefty dose of empathy to customers by asking what they are thinking, feeling, and doing at different touchpoints and channels.
Depending on the industry, niche, and size of the business the touchpoints may vary. But the most common ones are
1. Awareness & Consideration
2. Decision and Purchase
3. Retention and advocacy
Few examples of channels are Podcasts, Blogs, Instagram, Youtube, Website, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Tips — You can mark the channels and touchpoints in symbol or iconography representation for easy understanding.
Emotional Mapping
Map the different emotions of your customer at different touchpoints. Use the emotions to find out the opportunities to delight them by personalizing and by reducing the friction gap.
Check and validate
Once the mapping is done, now it’s time to cross-check the findings, suggested solutions both personally and with the executive team. You can also validate the finding by directly interacting with the customers.
Take Action & Implement it
Here comes the D-Day. We all know that it is not possible to implement all the things in a single go. So, organize all your findings, solutions, and customer pain points by prioritizing them. Interact with the core executive committee and take actions by asking the questions like,
1. Is it worth the investment to fix it?
2. How feasible is this change?
Conclusion
While Mapping the customer experience journey could involve a lot of effort, it’s all worth it as it offers many benefits for the overall health of a business. With that being said, I extend my regards to taking your first step towards providing a holistic experience to your customers
