“Customer journey mapping is literally mapping out the best path for your customers. The more seamless an experience you can create, the better the customer experience will be.”
(Forbes, Nov 2018)
A customer journey map is a visual representation of every experience your customers have with you. The mapping process involves documenting pictorially every touchpoint and interaction – from the first moment a customer hears about your organisation, to their last point of contact with you. At each stage, it’s about challenging yourself to do things better: How can we make things easier, more intuitive and more personalised for the customer?
The more trouble a customer has getting to their destination, the more likely they are to become someone else’s customer. Mapping the customer journey involves putting yourself in the customer’s shoes at every single touchpoint. Doing it through their eyes (and not yours) is key to building empathy, and ultimately improving customer experience. It will make you consider the obstacles customers might face and how you can create a more efficient and intuitive pathway for them.
We can work with you to plot the end-to-end customer journey – highlighting emotional hotspots for both employee and customer. To do this, we’ll tap into Voice of the Customer data, interview cross-functional working groups and absorb any other sources of customer knowledge.
Once the work is done, you’ll have a visual representation of customer processes, needs and touchpoints. At each touchpoint we’ll identify if customers’ needs are being met and how you can improve things for the customer (and, in many cases for the employee).
We’ll use your customer journey map to help us to shape your customer experience strategy and to build bespoke training programmes for your employees.
To ensure that your journey map gets “buy-in” from your organisation, involve other internal stakeholders throughout the process of building the map. A co-created journey map is more likely to win support across the organisation – and those actions arising from the mapping process are more likely to get done!