How To Do Customer Journey Mapping
At IvyJack, customer journey planning is a core part of the services we provide to our clients, and this is our view on how to get the best out of the process for everyone involved.
What is a customer journey?
A customer journey is the entire end-to-end experience a customer has when they engage with your business. It begins when they first become aware of your brand and extends to their first tentative enquiry, all the way through the buying process and post-purchase evaluation. It involves all customer interactions (touch points), online and offline, and repeats every time a customer interacts with your business in the future.
Understanding the importance of customer journey planning
By plotting this journey, businesses can gain a comprehensive understanding of their customers' motivations, emotions, and behaviours at each touchpoint, and so can refine and improve their processes to serve their customers better. Here’s our 5-step guide to customer journey mapping.
5 Steps to developing an excellent customer journey
- Research and data collection: Understanding more about your current customers and how they behave is crucial, and research is essential to gather customer data, feedback, and preferences. This can be done formally using external research partners and informally using sources such as social media, digital channels, surveys and customer feedback forms. At this stage, the questions to address are simply what is being done well, what’s not so good and what could be done better?
2. Define customer personas: Treating different customers differently is key to delivering outstanding customer experiences. To do this, we recommend creating simple customer ‘personas’ based on historical behaviour and preferences as expressed through data collection and research. This will help to tailor customer contact plans for different customer segments based on behavioural data as opposed to simply age or socio-demographic groupings.
3. Identify touchpoints and pain points: Mapping out different touchpoints customers encounter during their journey and how they link (or not) with each other is surprisingly informative. This could include social media interactions, website visits, customer support interactions, and more. As part of this process, honestly evaluating your pain points is essential. Knowing where bottlenecks occur and by spotting process ‘dead-ends’ in the customer journey means priority issues can be addressed quickly, reducing customer churn whilst the overall process is being improved.
4. Implement improvements strategically: Assessing improvements can be overwhelming, even for the most advanced businesses. Experience tells us that there will be plenty of issues that could be addressed. However, our primary recommendation at this stage is to prioritise. You are unlikely to have the resources (time, money or staff), to deal with everything all at once, so rank them based on the biggest impact to customer satisfaction and put together an action plan accordingly.
5. Monitor and evolve: Customer journey planning is an ongoing and continuous process. The biggest oversight organisations make is to undertake this review once and then forget about it. Continuously monitoring customer interactions and evaluating feedback is essential for ongoing improvement. It is also important to realise that it is unlikely you will make improvements just right on the first attempt. It takes time and commitment to continuously evolve your processes, but this is what will give you the biggest return on investment over time.
A final thought…
Customer journey improvement is a business philosophy, not just a marketing fad.
Customer journey planning puts the customer at the centre of all business activities and compels businesses to think about how they can best satisfy customers before they think about satisfying shareholders, the executive team or even their own staff. It takes courage and commitment to do it properly, but by empathising with the needs and preferences of their customers, organisations of all sizes can align their strategies accordingly, and deliver personalised experiences that their competitors do not. Done well, it creates a unique competitive advantage that encourages brand loyalty and builds brand and business value.
It's not easy, which is why organisations benefit from working with an experienced external partner such as us. By advising on best practice and providing objective input, we not only keep organisations on track but we can help you to reach your destination quicker.
Now, isn’t this a journey worth taking with us?
Call us on 0116 218 2750 to find out more.
