Customer Experience Journey is defined by the events surrounding customer engagement with a product or service from start to finish. Customer journeys are shaped by events that often involve multiple touch points and can be quantified in hours, days or weeks, including make-or-break moments that determine whether the customer is willing to invest in your brand or walk away altogether. Onboarding new customers, upgrading products and services, or resolving technical issues are a just a few of the many critical customer journeys involving interaction with a brand.
While companies tend to focus on digital touch points along the way, it is easy to lose sight of what the cumulative experience of a customer, or Customer Experience Journey looks like over time. To reach customers, it is important to see the end-to-end experience they have with your brand, through their eyes. Mapping the customer journey is a critical step to understanding your customer, identifying what your organization gets right about them, and the ways it may be alienating them.
There are several steps to customer journey mapping, i.e. creating visual representations of the path-to-purchase. Identifying all of your brand touch points (for example, social media, customer service or phone App), then organizing them in an outline is a good first step. This list is the “framework” of your map that captures how customers interact with your brand. The next step is to find out what the buyer persona is, which helps to clarify who it is your brand is trying to reach and helps frame the conversation around that demographic.
What are your customer’s goals? Looking back at the list of touch points and the intelligence gathered during these interactions produces valuable data about customer experience, and what customers hope to gain from engaging with your brand. After establishing who your customer is, touch points and customer goals, the customer journey can be visually mapped out, from initial contact to final sale and ongoing engagement. The ultimate goal of customer journey mapping is to see the flow of interactions, from start to finish, in order to assess customer support, identify pain points along the way, and improve customer experience.
Customer Experience Journey mapping helps companies deliver better customer experiences: