How To Use Customer Journey Maps to Improve Your CX Strategy

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The following is a small section from How to Use Customer Journey Maps to Solve Your CX Challenges on the Experience Investigators Learning Center. Read the full article here.

If you’re new to the topic, customer journey maps visualize the paths customers take to engage with your organization. And this journey starts before they’re even a customer.

Journey maps identify critical customer touchpoints, including offline and online channels and touchpoints. They’re all about the customer’s perspective, making them different from process maps or product roadmaps, for example.

Teams often start with a general journey map that shows how customers typically engage with them. They then expand the base map to reflect the unique paths of specific customer personas for specific needs.

For example, the CX team at a bank could create journey maps for customers who:

• Are applying for loans for life events like buying a house, going to college, or starting a business
• Prefer mobile options whenever possible
• Access specific services for businesses

Of course, this is an oversimplification of the many customers and how they may interact. However, it could be a perfect starting point if the hypothetical bank is starting from scratch!

Journey Maps Help Achieve CX and Business Goals

The best place to start with any map is to ask: WHY are we mapping this customer journey?

Each time you spend time, energy, effort, and resources on mapping, you need to start with a goal.

The goal to “understand” is typically not enough. What do you want to understand? How to create a more seamless journey to apply for a loan? What obstacles are in the way of a business banking customer who seeks a loan? Are our mobile options offering the right options?

Get clear about your WHY. Then determine your scope, which is where these specific needs and personas will be focused.

Customer Journey Mapping Tools

There are a few types of journey mapping tools you can consider:

• Software made specifically to support journey mapping
• Larger CX platforms that include journey mapping features
• Visual design tools to manually build your journey maps

(Or you can stay scrappy with sticky notes and whiteboards. But tools can help you socialize and visualize in ways that can empower you to evolve over time faster.)

A natural starting point is to review the technology your organization already has and explore what journey mapping features they may include. You might be surprised which capabilities are already at your disposal!

It helps to start a tech inventory (if you don’t already have one) as you review your existing technology stack. Start a spreadsheet listing each tool, what it’s used for, what other tools it connects to, and what features it offers.

If you decide seeking a new tool is the best option for journey mapping, then you should center your search around one question: What goals do I want to achieve through customer journey mapping? You’ll likely have many things you want to achieve, and keep these top of mind as you explore options.

Practical Customer Journey Mapping Use Cases

Remember that your customer journey maps are a tool you can use in so many different ways. As you begin using your maps or making the case to your executives why they’re a priority, consider these valuable applications.

Immersing Your Team in the Customer Experience

Print your journey map and provide it to team members or host a journey map walkthrough to help immerse your team in the customer experience. Dedicate time to explain your journey maps and highlight the highs and lows at each point so team members can feel invigorated to help shape that journey. Some tools provide an interactive way to view the maps, so you can take advantage of different views by persona, channel, product, etc.

Boost Customer Acquisition

Journey maps can identify channels you may be missing, or opportunities to refine how you approach each channel. By understanding what customers need as they begin exploring your solution, you can partner with marketing and content peers to craft experiences that turn potential customers into lifelong fans.

Optimize Cross-Selling and Upselling

Journey maps can show moments where customers are more likely to consider additional products or services—and moments where you should not push too hard. Examine the emotional journey of customers at each step to focus on where it matters most. If customers are stressed or anxious at specific stages, you shouldn’t overwhelm them with unnecessary information or push to make an additional sale. On the flip side, you can find moments where customers are typically open to considering complementary or enhanced solutions.

Improve Customer Retention

If you notice customers frequently drop off during specific parts of the journey, those are great places to examine first. How might your existing experience in those moments fail to meet your customer’s needs? Are you missing a key consideration? Or is drop-off expected at that point because of their shopping habits? Some things are outside of our control, however, you won’t know until you look into the moment.

Make Onboarding Effortless

As customers first get started with your product or service, they may face a few difficulties or confusion in hitting their stride. Journey maps reinforce the importance of every part of the customer’s lifetime with your organization, and you can more quickly improve the onboarding experience with a well-built journey map reflecting individual persona needs.

Build Omnichannel Experiences

Journey maps keep you ahead of the ever-changing landscape of channels customers may use to engage with you. By consistently reviewing and updating your journey maps, you can identify new channels and find ways to seamlessly blend them with your existing journeys.

Tips for Journey Mapping Success

Journey mapping is an iterative process, and it will require help from members across your organization. As we’ve partnered with organizations to advance their journey mapping skills, we often see a few common hurdles.

The following tips can keep you on track and move your maps forward, regardless of which solution(s) you choose:

• Know your goal. Before you start, identify what problem you are solving, what question you are answering, or what action you will be taking. Too many journey maps are created “just because” and end up creating no change. Have a plan and scope so you can focus on real solutions and outcomes.
• Focus on one persona at a time. Have a clear idea of which customer persona you are exploring, and immerse yourself in their experience as you map the paths they may take. You will expand your map as you examine other journeys. It’s easy to get distracted by focusing on too many personas at the same time.
• Keep an agenda during brainstorming sessions. You’ll want to gather representatives from across departments to discuss the customer journey. But as the saying goes about too many cooks… it’s easy for competing priorities and tangential topics to come up during mapping sessions. Start a list of anything extraneous that comes up, and stay focused on your agenda.
• Reinforce the need for customer empathy. Depending on how your journey mapping discussions go, it can help to spend dedicated time exploring the feelings customers experience at each step. What are their perceived challenges, pains, or frustrations? When are they most excited or hopeful? These emotions will guide you in deciding which areas could be most important to focus on first.
• Consider bringing in an outside expert. Some organizational leaders need to hear from an external expert to take some things seriously. An outside perspective often helps identify things that have become “unseen” or assumed. Bringing in a CX consultant can help navigate internal politics and streamline the conversations.
• Create an action plan. Know who on your team will have the power to implement any changes you identify as you build your maps. Understanding the journey is a major accomplishment, and having an action plan will help you make the most of that valuable investment faster.
• Be ready to prioritize. Journey mapping and related sessions will identify a lot of areas you can focus on. But you can’t cover everything all at once! Create a scoring mechanism to identify the most important areas to address, like experiences with high emotional impact or moments that are most important for moving someone from consideration to purchase.

For some journey mapping tool recommendations, continue reading the full article here.

This article is a small section from How to Use Customer Journey Maps to Solve Your CX Challenges from ExperienceInvestigators.com .