Customer journey mapping helps businesses step into their customer’s shoes and is a key step on the path to digital success. It helps organisations gain insights into common customer pain points, how they can improve the customer experience, and define what existing and prospective customers need in order to complete common tasks.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of every experience your customers have with you to complete a specific action. It helps to tell the story of a customer's experience with your brand from engagement into hopefully a long-term relationship. At first glance, a customer’s journey is pretty simple. But once you get into the detail, customer journeys are quite complex and come in many varieties. Your customers can come into contact with your business in a multitude of ways and their engagement spans multiple teams and underlying systems. 

From a customer’s perspective, they want their experience with a brand to be connected and seamless. They expect companies to know and remember, across multiple touchpoints, who they are and what they’re looking for, and any previous requests so that the necessary information is available without having to repeat or clarify their needs. A map helps reveal issues with siloes in your business.

Key Benefits

The benefits of a customer journey map include:

• · helping you see where customers interact with your business
• · focusing the business on particular customer needs at different stages 
• · showing the gaps between the desired customer experience and the one actually received
• · providing a clear view into all of the underlying roles and systems involved in specific customer tasks
• · highlighting development priorities
• · allowing you to concentrate efforts and expenditure on what matters most to maximise effectiveness 

Safeguarding Your Future

Many engagements are shifting from offline to online, using a variety of digital tools to help. And as more ‘digital natives’ enter the world of work and gain purchasing power, online interactions grow in commercial importance. 

Understanding how these interactions work, and how to take advantage of them, is vital to business success. 

A customer journey map is just the first step to staying on top of this change. Businesses need increasingly sophisticated processes and tools and that requirement is likely to increase in future – the number of touchpoints is increasing in number by around 20% a year according to McKinsey. With more touchpoints comes more complexity in servicing customer needs successfully. A map should help highlight areas where technology can ease the burden and challenges faced by your business.  

Contact us to find out how we can help your organisation develop a meaningful customer journey map to help you on the path to digital success.