Today’s customers are demanding for personalised engagements with brands on the channels of their choice, and organisations have had to respond by investing in technology solutions to meet these needs. Companies making the change to omnichannel environments are often still held back by defaulting to using traditional channels such as the telephone and email, and need to look toward developing living customer journey maps in order to optimise touch points, personalise engagements, drive innovation and enhance customer experiences.
There is a wealth of resources online around customer journey mapping, but at the very basic level it is about an organisation putting themselves in their customers’ shoes and looking at what experience they have with the company. Through user personas, businesses can build a view of what a typical customer will have to go through when they interact with the brand, right down to how they will engage with systems, processes and people, and across multiple channels.
There is much that organisations stand to lose by not carrying out a customer journey mapping exercise – without this information, how do they know what their customers are experiencing or what their behaviours, preferences, pain points or expectations are? Even a business with a great product or service will eventually struggle if customer experiences are consistently poor, and without a customer journey map, they will not even know what to change.
Crucially, a lack of a customer journey map can result in disjointed communications across various channels, causing confusion for customers. On the other hand, ensuring consistent messaging and narrative across platforms can help build and strengthen customer trust in an era where fraudulent messages and phishing emails are on the rise.
An organisation’s systems, processes and technologies in use tend to evolve organically over time, and it is seldom that they take the time to look at what impact changing a particular system or process, or implementing a new service has on the overall customer experience. If a change results in a negative experience, they need to look at how this can be addressed.
While businesses understand the importance of feedback loops, and make use of multiple methods including phone calls, surveys, customer satisfaction scores and net promoter scores, they often struggle to translate this information into actionable insights to improve customer experiences.
With a customer journey map, they now have an opportunity to standardise how they collect this feedback – the ‘Voice of the Customer‘ – and optimise their processes in order to enhance the satisfaction of the customer across every touch point. Here then are 8 crucial steps to developing a customer journey map.
A customer journey map in 8 steps
- The objective: it all starts with the objective and what the organisation wants to achieve. Are they looking to map out an end-to-end process or just of a specific service area such as sales? And what are they hoping to learn from carrying out the process? A flawed objective (or no objective) will result in a meaningless customer journey map.
- Information gathering: gathering all relevant information that is related to the specific objective, including people, business processes and technologies in use.
- Identifying customer touch points: looking at all the avenues through which customers can engage with the brand. It includes looking at channels where customers engage, how many customers are engaging, and how often. This extends to looking into all automated systems that also send out customer communications. Ultimately, if a customer reaches out from a particular channel, this component identifies what is the most seamless route to servicing that customer while maintaining a high level of satisfaction.
- Setting phases and stages: a customer journey map comprises phases and stages. The first component is phases and this can consist of 4 to 6 phases depending on a businesses’ objectives, and can include awareness, acquisition, maintenance, retention, etc. Each one of these phases is broken down into further stages, which look at what action they want the customer to take. For example, how does a brand engage with a customer specifically in the acquisition stage? What do they want the customer to do next? This step enables brands to understand what needs to be improved and how.
- The mapping process: This is the starting point of the actual mapping process, and is the biggest portion of the journey and ideally requires lengthy consultation with an experienced partner. Organisations such as Telviva make use of a swim lane approach, which takes into account all customer touch points and system touch points in order to create a single, cohesive look and feel, and experience for the end customer. This area also looks at how automation can be introduced to further enhance the customer experience.
- Validation: as with all projects involving data, this step looks at whether all information was captured, whether it was captured correctly and how the various components (as identified in step 4) mirror each other in order to create a seamless experience.
- Continuous evaluation: here, organisations have the opportunity to delve deeper into their customer journey map and look at how they can make a positive change within particular components that have been identified as areas of improvement. This requires a constant re-look at the objective, touch points and the different stages that customers have to go through, and making use of user stories to identify areas for further improvement
- Living document: for a customer journey map to be a success, organisations have to maintain it as a living document, actively managing customer journey components, and continually looking at what impact every change they make will have on their customers. If they adopt a new system or process, how does that change the customer experience?
The last point is crucial to ensuring that their customer journey map is relevant and aligned to their business objectives, and this is where it is critical that businesses work with an experienced partner to guide them along the journey. As a provider of managed contact centre services, Telviva doesn’t just install software and then walk away, but uses its experience from past deployments at multiple organisations across several industries, and applies that to ensure companies can optimise their omnichannel investments.
Whether you require a basic solution or a full-function omnichannel operation, our highly experienced professional service team will help you evaluate the best fit for your needs and your digital journey. Contact us today.
By Martie de Beer, CCaaS Executive at Telviva
