With so much chaos going on these days, it’s easy to lose sight of what your customers are truly experiencing with your company. While the end goals are typically to send your customers what they ordered, answering inquiries, etc., the customer’s experience to get there is just as (if not more) important. Companies who take the time to dissect and fix the roadblocks that their customers are experiencing tend to have higher retention rates and overall happier customers.
Keep reading to uncover the steps to take to create an insightful Customer Journey Map and excel in customer experience!
What is Customer Journey Mapping?
Customer Journey Mapping is a CX practice of creating a visual representation of every customer interaction with your brand. This ranges from seeing an ad on social media, all the way to post-purchase feelings. Around 89% of companies are competing on the basis of “Customer Experience,” and with Customer Journey Mapping, you can analyze, better understand, and improve the experience your customers have with your company.
Why Should You Build a Customer Journey Map?
The benefits of Customer Journey Mapping to your CX are endless, but below are the two major takeaways:
Understanding your customers better:
This should be one of your main goals. Without loyal, happy customers, your business won’t continue to grow. So, take time to uncover your customers’ pain points, follow the path they would take to resolve their dilemma and observe the roadblocks they may encounter with your brand while finding a solution. At the end of the day, you want to ensure they are having the best experience possible. In fact, Customer Journey Mapping increases marketing ROI by 54%. It’s a win for your company AND your customers! Not to mention, customer retention is always cheaper than customer acquisition.
Filling in the missing pieces:
Building out a Customer Journey Map can shed light on an area of customer experience that your brand may be slacking in - it’s not too often that we go through our own business’ customer journey. Statistics show that about 85% of individuals who have an “excellent” customer experience are “likely” to repurchase from the same company, so why not double-check to ensure your customer is getting the best experience possible with your brand?
When Should You Create a Customer Journey Map?
Customer Journey Maps are proven to help drive better customer insights and improve internal efficiency. They can help brands identify engagement and enhancement opportunities, as well as increase conversions and ROI. If you are noticing negative customer interaction reviews about your brand, dive into those ‘whys’. Yes, you may encounter negative experiences when creating your company’s map, but that only leads to an improved customer experience strategy!
Read some of our tips on how to improve your brand’s CX
If you have goals such as shifting your company’s perspective, assigning ownership of key touchpoints, or learning about a specific customer persona’s purchasing behaviors, you may want to consider building out a Customer Journey Map! It’s a functional way for you to learn and understand your brand from the outside in.
How To Create a Value-Packed Customer Journey Map
Determine who your buyer persona is:
It’s easy to assume that we know our customer’s behaviors and struggles - but it’s essential to change “assuming customer pain points” into “experiencing the customer’s pain points.” Becoming a secret shopper for your brand is a beneficial way to uncover the great (and not-so-great) customer experiences with your brand.
Visit your website, start a live chat or place an inbound call with a clear mind - you’ll be amazed at the insights you uncover. If you want an unbiased opinion, work with an outsourced customer experience partner or someone who hasn’t interacted with your brand before.
Before diving into your Customer Journey Map, ask yourself the below questions:
What are the goals your customers aim to achieve in any given lifecycle stage?
Where does your persona start in the journey? Do they start in the awareness stage as a potential customer? Or do you follow them after they reach the onboarding stage as a current customer?
What are their pain points before, during and after engaging with your brand?
Create a Customer Journey Map template that clearly shows the journey process. You’ll want to include:
The user’s activities - Outline which action(s) you took in each buyer’s journey stage. Here are a few activities you could analyze:
Customer Service Calls
Live chat or chat support experience
Emailing customer support
Utilizing self-help customer support, such as an FAQ page
Feelings and needs - Describe what you felt during and after the activity such as:
Being on a call with one of the service agents
Waiting a long time in a live chat
Receiving a friendly and personalized email response
Potential Solutions - Outline where your brand could make improvements to excel in customer experience. Also, notice where your customer support is thriving! Add those strengths in other CX areas.
Make Necessary Improvements
After analyzing the feedback from each experience, create a customer experience strategy that offers solutions to the problems you ran into.
Common customer experience issues relate to:
Long wait times for phone support
Chatbot not answering questions in enough detail
Delayed email responses
Wanting to speak with a human, instead of a bot, to resolve issues
Essential Customer Journey Touchpoints
Each customer has their preferred way of communicating. To have an optimized customer experience strategy, your brand needs to consider offering the same experience for each channel that you provide.
If you’re offering a variety of channels, such as phone, social media, and email support, but not the same overall experience across the board, you may want to take a step back and focus on perfecting one channel at a time. This is called Channel Mastery. You don’t want to create chaos for your customers - they would prefer 1-2 highly optimized touchpoints rather than 4-5 mediocre ones.
Some touchpoints to consider perfecting in your CX strategy are:
Phone Support
Now, more than ever, people are craving human interaction with customer support. Trading automated responses with a live service agent on the other end will make a huge difference in customer satisfaction ratings. Whether customers are at the beginning of the buyer’s journey, or at the end of it, they’ll always want to pick up the phone and speak with a live agent to have their questions answered when issues arise.
Live Chat
Live chat has the highest satisfaction levels for any customer service channel, at 73%.
Chat is a convenient option for customers at all stages of the buyer’s journey and allows an increase in conversations while decreasing response time.
When integrating this touchpoint, ensure that you aren’t relying solely on chatbots; customers appreciate when they can chat with a real person. A current trend with this touchpoint is using a chatbot to begin the conversation and help understand the problem, then transferring to an agent to solve the actual problem.
Check out this blog post to learn more about why companies are kicking chatbots to the curb
Communicating with your customers the way they prefer to be communicated with increases customer satisfaction and retention rates. Keeping this in mind, email was the most used digital channel for customer service last year, so you’ll definitely want to add this channel to your CX.
Don’t forget to add the human element to this touchpoint, too! Actions as simple as adding the agent’s name to the email address makes it a more personal interaction. Providing timely and personable responses for one of our clients has increased the overall customer satisfaction score by 6%!
Text Messaging/SMS Support
Texting is a fast way to communicate, and in today’s world, most people prefer this channel! 90% of all text messages are read in under five seconds, so if you have live agents ready to respond to texts, this could be your fastest channel to communicate with your customers.
Always make sure the human element is added to each channel you provide. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can only interact with people until a certain point and can’t pick up on subtle cues of human emotion. The goal is to interact with customers on a personal level, don’t take that away from them!
Concluding Thoughts
Customer Journey Mapping can be useful to you and your brand in many ways. It can be a tedious process to create one, but you’ll be amazed by how much you learn about your brand’s customer experience. In many instances, consumers choose brands based on their experience with them - make this one of the reasons why your customers choose you over competitors.
Need help mapping out your brand’s customer journey? Reach out to us and we’d be glad to chat with you about it.
ABOUT INCEPT
Incept is an outsourced call center service that brings true conversational marketing back to customer experience. Our team of customer service representatives and experts partner with your team to improve the outcome of customer interactions and satisfaction, promote and protect your brand, and accelerate growth.
We’ve worked with some of the largest brands in the world to develop CX campaigns with one main goal - strengthen relationships at every touch point. From inbound phone calls and technical support, to organic and paid social media campaigns, to live chat, Incept is one of the best call center outsourcing vendors to assist all your CX and lead generation needs.