How Customer Journey Mapping Can Accelerate Your CX Success

Customer journey mapping is an essential tool in your organization’s arsenal if you’re looking to transform your customer experience (CX). It helps you identify all aspects of the customer experience across the different touchpoints and functions delivered by your organization.

Building your business upon unfounded assumptions about your customers is as good as flying blind. Utilizing customer journey services to develop a customer journey map provides you with an insights-driven roadmap to meet and exceed your customers’ expectations.

How to construct a customer journey map

A customer journey mapping process should be grounded in both qualitative and quantitative insights. Through interviews, surveys and analysis, you can uncover details about critical points in the customer’s decision-making process so you can see where and how to influence their decisions.

From these insights, you can group individual customer journeys into customer personas that help you find, size and profile the most common types of ways your audience engages with your brand across every touchpoint.

You can then create a visual representation of how each customer persona type progresses from their pain point through to purchasing from your brand, using the product/service and eventually becoming a repeat customer.

Gaining customer insights isn’t only important at the beginning of your customer journey mapping process, you should continue to co-create and iterate with your customers by asking them what delights them and what annoys them. Your customer journey map needs to be a living document rather than a snapshot in time.

The benefits of customer journey mapping

By visualizing how your customers engage with your brand, consumer journey mapping can reveal opportunities where you can spur real organizational change and see real results.

In addition to gaining a deeper understanding of your customers – which can prove valuable in many ways to your business – consumer journey mapping helps you diagnose where you’re falling short of customer expectations and where you need to focus your attention.

Rather than having to assume what’s working and what isn’t, customer journey mapping is critical to building a customer-centric business. The insights and maps can be used to orient and unite across departments and across touchpoints to ensure that, at every stage of their engagement with your brand, your customers’ needs are met.

Key elements of successful customer journey mapping

• Thinking too narrowly about how your customers interact with your brand can cripple a customer journey mapping process. Your customers don’t exist in a vacuum; they travel outside your ecosystem, and there are factors outside of your control that exert an influence upon their behavior. You need to map and understand the complete customer journey – even touchpoints like the checkout experience at a retailer that carries your products are important. Painting a complete picture is essential to making the necessary interventions to optimize your customer journey.

• Though building a comprehensive and complete journey map is essential, if it’s too cluttered and complex, you risk losing buy-in from your team because they’ll think that customer experience transformation is too large a task to tackle. A simplified visualization is essential for a streamlined activation.

Using customer journey mapping for business strategy

It’s one thing to create a consumer journey map. It’s another thing to use that map to inform strategy and drive effective organizational change. The success of your customer journey mapping process depends on how well you mobilize and integrate it into and across your organization – otherwise, it’s just a graphic that’s left on the shelf.

The most essential factor to successfully activating a customer journey mapping process is to ensure everyone is aligned around the goal of creating a standout customer experience and bought into their specific role in achieving that goal. It’s everyone’s responsibility, not just a single team or department, because your customers don’t only engage with one team or department.

This process of activating a customer journey mapping process can also create opportunities for cultural change within your organization. You can challenge existing assumptions and philosophies and push everyone on your team to think like a customer.

It’s also essential to not let “perfect” be the enemy of “good.” With limited operational capacity and financial resources, it’s important to prioritize the low-hanging fruit interventions that will have the most impactful results for your customers. Not every customer journey needs to be completely uprooted and retooled from the ground up; sometimes all you need is a tweak to fix the issue.

How Material can help you transform your customer journey

At Material, customer journey mapping is just one way we help drive true CX transformation. Our customer journey consultants specialize in crafting effective strategies with the ability to understand the consumer’s journey.

As a customer experience agency, we don’t focus only on customer journey mapping, which is an essential step in improving customer experience. We emphasize customer journey management, which understands, plans, implements and optimizes a portfolio of journey maps to generate value-building enhancements to the customer experience, supported by our dedicated customer experience service.

We approach every customer journey mapping project with an eye toward enabling clients to master ongoing journey management so they can maximize its long-term value.

One element of this process is helping you build what we call a “Journey Atlas” — the “map of maps” used to stay aligned across your portfolio of customer journeys. This provides your brand with a direct link to acting on optimizations for your customer journeys and creates positive outcomes for both your customers and your organization.

FAQs

Why should a business use a customer journey map?

Through customer journey mapping, your business can create a common understanding of 1) how your customers engage with your brand and 2) what the roles and responsibilities are for your team members to deliver optimized customer journeys that delight.

How can you measure the success of a customer journey map?

The goal of consumer journey mapping is to increase your conversion rate – how efficiently your customers move from touchpoint to touchpoint – and related metrics like cost per conversion (CPC). Ultimately, tracking sales will also be important in measuring the success of a consumer journey mapping process.

How many customer journey maps do you need?

Since not all of your customers are the same, you can’t capture their experiences in a single customer journey map. Businesses should have a customer journey map for each audience segment so you can personalize the experience for each customer.

Should customer journey maps be used for evaluating current-state experiences of designing ideal-state experiences?

Having customer journeys for both the current-state customer experience and the ideal can be helpful to diagnose where to focus your activations.

A proven approach to accelerate your CX success

If you’re looking to transform your customer experience, a customer journey mapping process can be the tool that helps deliver real results. By uncovering deeper human insights and understanding into your customers, you can align your team’s efforts and deliver incredible customer experiences.

Want to learn more about how to drive your CX transformation? Start the conversation.