6 Reasons your business needs a customer journey map

Say it with me -?"I will not ship my org chart"

Seventy-three percent of customers say customer experience (CX) is the top thing they consider when deciding whether to purchase from a company. Your org’s CX is how customers perceive all the interactions they have with your business at any given point—and amid an increasingly competitive market, truly understanding your customers and their experience with your brand has never been more crucial.

In an era where half of all customers will switch to a competitor after a single unsatisfactory experience, building a customer-centric, empathic customer experience as a business isn’t a nice to have—it’s a must for success. And it starts with customer journey mapping.?

50% of customers will switch to a competitor after a single unsatisfactory experience

What is customer journey mapping?

A customer journey map is a visualization of the customer journey. It tells the story of your customers’ experiences and helps your team (and the broader org) better understand and empathize with your customers. Journey mapping is all about clarifying CX to understand and address your customers’ needs.?

A journey map forces you to look critically at how your customers are actually experiencing your brand versus how you think they do. It helps you deliver on customer expectations while creating exceptional digital experiences they love. It also lightens the load for your customer support managers (CSMs).

Webex used customer observation to uncover hidden use cases

When you create a journey map, you empathize with your customers and discover how to serve them better. The team at Webex did extensive journey mapping exercises to learn how customers navigate their brand journey. But they also observed customers to understand their experience with Webex products thoroughly.

The product team initially thought everyone in the manufacturing, gas, and electric industries would love the Webex smartboards for their live whiteboarding capabilities. Sure enough, companies within these industries bought a lot of smartboards.?

Sitting with customers and observing how they used smartboards was transformative for the team at Webex. It showed the team that they were marketing and measuring the wrong things for this audience.

But after meeting with customers and seeing how they used the smartboards in action, the team at Webex found that companies weren’t actually using them as whiteboards—at all. They used the boards for their pinch and zoom capabilities for detailed blueprints.?

The killer feature we didn't intend to build.

Pinch and zoom.

Huh.

We didn't even have telemetry to measure adoption of the main reason they bought our product.

This opened up a conversation about how to better address their live collaboration needs. Webex got the insights to create a more empathetic experience and design a better product with more tailored marketing.

Breaking down silos for a better customer experience

When companies build their CX around an org chart—instead of the customer—people get stuck in frustrating, nonsensical loops.?

Rule number one of CX? Don't ship your org chart.

Think about the last time you called customer service. Once you finally got a support agent, they transferred you to another department, then another, and so on. All you wanted was to solve your problem or get an answer. Instead, you got an experience that bounced you around—they shipped the org chart.?

Rule number two of CX? Don't ship your org chart.

Take this real-life example I dealt with just a few weeks ago. When I flew from Dallas to London, the airline lost my bag. I went to the American Airlines desk for help but was directed to another queue with British Airways (since they were the flight operators).?

After waiting in line for 45 minutes to get to the front of the British Airways line, the clerk sent me back to American Airlines (AA) because I had bought my ticket from AA. You can imagine the look on my face. I wasn't hiding the frustration of going back and forth well.

But what if there was a single queue for customers to find lost luggage? I wished the airline prioritized returning my bag to me and delivering a positive experience instead of siloing departments to ensure they stayed in their lane.

Rule number three of CX? Don't ship your org chart.

With siloed departments, you get a lot of “that’s not my job,” which hangs the customer out to dry. This approach prioritizes your org—not the customer or how they interact with you.

If the airline had created a customer journey map, they might have seen opportunities to implement simple yet impactful solutions to improve CX and reduce friction, such as:

• Empowering self-service with the right resources at the right time
• Creating a singular, holistic point of contact to address customer needs across partner airlines
• Limiting confusion by providing digitized information from the start, like luggage tracking delivered via email or in-app.

Journey mapping helps make sense of each customer’s journey so you can design an exceptional experience around it. Creating a great customer experience isn’t the neatly curated digital experiences we create—it’s in between, the gaps we often forget about or let fall by the wayside. Journey mapping helps break down organizational silos to focus on the customer.

6 Reasons your business needs a customer journey map

A perfectly designed product and robust support team won’t go far if your CX drives clients away or makes it difficult to use your products and services. You can radically improve their experience by leveraging journey mapping. Here’s how:

1. It helps you understand your customers

The better you understand customers' expectations and needs, the more you can tailor the CX to meet them. Journey mapping challenges your assumptions about customers and digs deep to discover what they're actually thinking, feeling, and doing. Get in their heads—how would you feel if you had to talk to four people to get a simple issue resolved? Probably not thrilled.

2. You reveal pain points

By mapping each touchpoint and interaction a customer has with your business, you can uncover hidden pain points or blockers in the customer journey. Gain insight into what is (and isn’t) working well for customers and create solutions that address these issues.?

Let’s think about Southwest or Delta Airlines. They know waiting in line to get a boarding pass is a timesuck and annoying during busy seasons. The fix? Create a solution that delights customers and solves this problem: mobile boarding.

3. It makes you more intentional about the customer experience

Businesses use design processes to optimize every aspect of the buying experience, from beautifully designed presentations and digital journeys to a high-quality product… so why not CX? Your brand is delivering an experience—whether you design it or not. A journey map allows you to be intentional about the experience customers have with you from start to finish.

By understanding CX and walking through your journey as your customers would, you can create, adjust, and enhance touchpoints to ensure you have the most effective, efficient buying and service processes. The result? Your customers are better able to achieve their goals with your company—and they’re more likely to remain a customer.

4. You gain insights to create personalized experiences (and solutions)

Customers value companies that empathize with their individual needs. Journey mapping and walking through your customers’ experiences reveals user intent and interactions, allowing you to create personalized experiences and solutions across brand touchpoints.?

Remember the Webex smartboard example? Talking with customers showed how manufacturing, gas, and electric customers were actually using their products, which led to a better understanding of positioning, marketing, and the functionalities customers cared about.?

Mapping the journey and getting in your customers’ heads lets you tailor your experience and offerings to align with each customer’s needs.

5. It helps align cross-functional stakeholders

The journey mapping process often involves getting cross-functional teams together to share perspectives, examine how customers interact with each touchpoint, and solve customer issues faster.

Aligning key stakeholders removes the guesswork around what customers want and clarifies areas of ownership, accountability, and hand-off between teams. This smooths CX while ensuring everyone in the organization is on the same page. No more of the “it’s not my responsibility” ideology that neglects the customer.

6. You unearth opportunities for innovation and growth

A well-researched customer journey map doesn’t impact just CX—it also provides insights that help you develop better products, marketing, and customer service across the organization. Use journey mapping to discover unmet needs and gaps in the market for customer-centric growth and innovation.

Create an empathetic CX with customer journey mapping

Whether it's your customers' success or business success, customer journey mapping helps with both. Creating a journey map helps empathize with your customers to understand their brand experience, pain points, and how you can customize touchpoints to create an even better experience (instead of shipping the org chart).?

The insights you uncover through journey mapping will help you find and fill gaps and make data-driven decisions to improve the customer experience. The result??

• Increased customer satisfaction
• Retention
• Customer success

So, who's ready to design their journey map?!

Stay tuned for my next post, where I'll delve into what you do after you have your journey map. Want to learn more? Check out my upcoming event this September.?