A look at your customers journey

So you have personas, now what? It is well documented that customer experience is a main driver of value for a company, and that understanding the needs and experiences of your customer should be a priority for your businesses. However, this often does not translate to a comprehensive look at how a customer interacts with a business and their needs along that journey. Companies need to look at their business from the eyes of their customer and evaluate their own business practices in delivering on those needs. This starts with defining and understanding the customer journey.???

Customer journey mapping is a visual representation of the customer journey from the perspective of your customer. It is the process of visualizing the steps and actions a customer takes to achieve their goals. It helps you tell the story of your customers’ experiences with your company across all touchpoints. Journey maps enable your team to have a better understanding of customer expectations and current experience versus desired experience and where the experience can be optimized. This exercise helps you structure your marketing, sales, and service efforts to be effective and efficient at meeting your customer needs.??

In fact, according to a recent study, 85% of professionals who have used customer journey maps found that they result in increased customer satisfaction, fewer complaints, lower churn, and a higher NPS (Net Promoter Score).??

How to Create Effective Customer Journey Maps

Define the stages of your Customer’s Journey. Customer journey maps should start with the triggering event that caused your persona to begin looking for solutions. This could be some type of problem they are trying to resolve or may be as simple as a contract coming up for renewal that triggers a search for solutions. Customer journey maps will typically span from that initial triggering event to how the customer first comes to know about your product or solution to the point where they have purchased and are using your product or service and considering re-purchase or renewal. Your customer journey map should marry the steps your customer actually takes (the external view) with your version of the marketing and sales funnel (the internal view) to identify the high-level stages that your customer goes through. Make sure you include post-purchase stages - these can range from onboarding and installation to usage, renewal and upgrade.?

Different stages may be more important to focus on in your journey than others. If your solution is widely known with your persona, awareness may not be an important stage for your persona. If most of your business is repeat business, you may have more stages focused on post-purchase stages like usage, renewal and upgrade). Build the journey relevant to your persona. It is common to find the following stages in a journey map:?

1. Trigger – What was the triggering event in the personas work or life that caused them to begin searching for solutions???
2. Awareness – How a persona comes to be aware of a brand, product or service that will help with their opportunity. Are they hearing about you through referrals or their own search efforts? Conferences and tech publications? Where do your personas go to help solve their problem??
3. Consideration – How does the persona looks at options and learn more about your product and solution to consider if it is a viable solution to their need. What steps does your persona take to learn more about your products or solutions? (e.g. reading whitepapers, looking at case studies, visiting a store, etc.) What information do they need to answer their questions??
4. Evaluating – How the persona evaluates products and solutions. What steps do they take, what information do they need, how do they gather information? This is the stage where you are probably being directly compared to your competitors on key features, functionality, pricing, brand reputation, service and support, etc. The list will depend on what is important to your persona. Maybe they want to demo your solution, or talk to the technical team.???
5. Purchase – What steps does the persona take to buy? How easy do you make it???
6. Post-Purchase – How does your persona begin to use your product or service? What steps do they take to onboard, implement your solution and what needs to they have along that part of the journey? What are their needs on-going as a customer and what value must be delivered for them to consider renewing or upgrading???

Journey Maps should highlight the needs and behaviors of your Personas.?Customers expect personalized experiences, relevant information, and ease of doing business. Customer journey maps are an opportunity to really delve into the needs, expectations and behaviors of your persona at each stage in their journey. A journey map will highlight all the touchpoints with your company and the needs at each stage so that you can begin to find ways to personalize the experience (e.g. deliver up different content across the different touchpoints to provide customers with what they need). To create a journey map that will be actionable, you need to:???

1. Define what the persona values at each stage. What is the customer trying to accomplish? What questions are the customer trying to answer at each stage???
2. Define the steps and actions the persona takes at each stage. What are the major activities/ steps the customer takes? What resources do they use? Who do they consult/ who influences them???
3. Highlight actions that are different or unique to this persona.?
4. Understand what the barriers might be from the personas perspective. What would prevent your persona from continuing on their journey???

Focus on the journey, not the individual experiences.?A comprehensive and effective customer journey map puts focus on the entire customer journey – not just individual experiences. A customer journey map should span the organization and provide a customer perspective across marketing, sales, product and service that can be used to identify opportunities to create value. This is easier said than done. The challenge often lies in the functional silos in which most organizations operate. Customers experience your company horizontally, across organizational boundaries, but most companies approach customer interaction on a functional basis.? To develop a meaningful customer journey map, these silos must be broken down so that action can be taken. Effective customer journey maps are created and maintained by a cross-functional team who can help implement changes across the customer lifecycle and can continue to feed new insight and information into the map as learning occurs about the customer.??

Customer journey maps must be based on data and insights.?With the amount of data available within companies today, there is no excuse to not be able to start to build your customer journey maps. Customer Experience (CX) technology solutions are helping companies understand the digital journey, but the tools are only as good as the data. Many organizations still can’t get to a single view of the customer in their existing systems so layering more technology on top of that or waiting until all your data is in order will just delay your time to impact. We suggest to just start with your existing data – piecing together the insights you have about your personas from technology and research you have in place today – and identify your knowledge gaps - the customer insight and data that you don’t have but would be valuable to inform your journey map and decision-making as you go forward. These information gaps can be prioritized and worked on over time to build a more comprehensive and accurate journey map.??

Maintenance is Required. Customer journey maps need to be maintained over time or they become irrelevant. Customer needs change and evolve, your journey maps need to as well. Not to mention that organizations are getting more sophisticated as they build capabilities through new technologies and better/ deeper analytics. What you know about your customer will grow over time as you test and learn. According to MyCustomer, the more frequently customer journey maps are updated, the more impact reported by the organization. In fact, they found that 56% of respondents who conducted customer journey mapping every month reported that the impact was ‘extremely positive’, this compares to 37% for those who conduct it every six months and only 22% for those who conduct it annually.

Understanding Value?

Customer journey maps are a great tool to give you a perspective of what steps the customer takes to evaluate, buy and use your product or service, what their needs and expectations are at each stage. The next step is to evaluate how well you are delivering on those needs versus your competitors to identify where your customers are having positive experiences and where there are negative experiences. These negative experiences are “value gaps” in that they detract from the value delivered to your customers. Value Gap Mapping is a tool to aid in identifying the areas of opportunity for value creation – from the customer’s perspective.???

Value Gap Maps - Evaluates your performance and your competitors’ performance
against the needs of your most important customers to identify the areas you
excel and where gaps exist. These gaps enable you to understand how value can
be created for your customers.?