Do you know exactly where you're losing your customers? Do you really know your customers’ pain points? Do you know what really makes your customers happy? Could you easily describe the end-to-end journey your customers go through with your company? If you answered no to any of these questions you probably do need to map this out. And even so, it's always useful to have it all documented.
In sales teams, it’s important that business relationship managers understand the customer journey. BRMs increasingly need to understand their business from the outside in, seeing their business from the customer’s perspective and being able to work alongside marketing to map customer journeys and touchpoints.
Basically, a journey map is a framework that maps out the stages in your customer's lifecycle. It will tell the story of your customers experience from start to finish. From the initial contact, it follows through the process of engagement into a long-term relationship. It identifies the key interactions a customer has with your business.
Importantly, it talks about the feelings, motivations and questions your customers have at each touch point of contact, and gives a sense of what your customers want and what they expect from your business. Once this is clear, you can work on delivering just that.
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The first step on your designed customer journey is to develop empathy for the customer by asking them questions about their experiences with the brand, by asking for direct customer feedback.You’ll ideally be able to observe your customers in their interactions (mystery shopping is a great tool) and even role play as one of their customers or clients to really be able to put yourself in their shoes.
All throughout their journey, capture everything they come in direct contact with, such as your brand’s website, mobile apps, physical stores, sales people, the customer support person etc. Importantly you want to capture the emotions, the motivations and customer expectations – and record whether they’re being met or not.
A journey map is seeing and feeling the brand from the perspective of the customer and not being limited by the organisation. Not only that but, it allows brands to identify “moments of truth”. That is the interactions that actually make or break the relationship with the brand. These are the customer touch points and interactions where you should focus your resources (money, people, and time) – not what you might assume that your customers care about.
Related content: How to use NPS to inform your customer journey map
A customer journey map done right can help you to quickly see where to focus your resources. Don’t let customer experience strategy turn into a vague beast, but use your map to transform it into something that is actionable very quickly.
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