How can you prioritize customer journey improvements?

1 What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping is a tool that helps you visualize and understand the end-to-end experience of your customers, from their initial contact with your brand to their post-purchase interactions. It helps you identify the touchpoints, channels, emotions, pain points, and opportunities that shape the customer journey. By creating a customer journey map, you can gain insights into how your customers perceive your service, what their needs and expectations are, and how you can improve their satisfaction and loyalty.

2 Why do you need to prioritize customer journey improvements?

Customer journey mapping is not a one-time activity, but a continuous process that requires regular updates and revisions. As your customers, competitors, and market conditions change, so do your customer journey maps. However, you cannot improve everything at once. You need to prioritize customer journey improvements based on their value for your customers and your business. Prioritizing customer journey improvements helps you focus on the most critical issues, allocate your resources efficiently, and measure your progress and results.

3 How can you prioritize customer journey improvements?

Prioritizing customer journey improvements can be done with a scoring system that evaluates each idea based on impact, feasibility, and alignment. Impact measures how much the improvement will enhance customer experience and satisfaction, reduce customer effort and frustration, and increase customer retention and advocacy. Feasibility looks at the time, cost, resources, and technology required for implementation. Alignment assesses how well the improvement aligns with strategic goals, vision, and values. Calculating the total score by adding or multiplying the individual scores allows you to rank the ideas from highest to lowest score and select the ones that have the most value for customers and your business.

4 How can you communicate and execute your prioritized customer journey improvements?

Once you have prioritized your customer journey improvements, it is important to communicate them to stakeholders, team members, and customers. You can use different tools and formats for this, such as a prioritization matrix that uses colors, shapes, or sizes to indicate the alignment score and the priority level of each idea. A roadmap can show when and how you plan to implement the improvements, along with the expected outcomes, milestones, and dependencies. You can also use a story to explain the rationale, benefits, and challenges of your improvement ideas, supported by customer feedback, data, and research.

After communicating your prioritized customer journey improvements, you need to execute them according to your plan. Monitor and evaluate their impact on the customer experience and satisfaction as well as on your business performance and goals. Different metrics like customer satisfaction scores, net promoter scores, customer effort scores, retention rates, or revenue growth can be used to measure and report results. Additionally, collect and analyze customer feedback, data, and research to identify new issues that may require further customer journey improvements.