Use Customer Journey Mapping to Elevate Customer Experience

Understanding and meeting customer expectations is crucial for success if you want your business to remain competitive.

Wait a minute. I want to rephrase that.?

Understanding and meeting customer expectations is the bare minimum. A higher goal is to elevate your customer's experience so their journey with you is memorable, making them a promoter, which could increase the likelihood of repeat business.

Why Map the Customer Journey?

For the answer, I turned to my global CX team’s expert on this subject, Heidi Taylor, CCXP , who helps to manage Lenovo’s commercial customer survey design and development program.

Heidi explained that before a company can elevate or exceed customer expectations, they must first delve deep into their customers’ past interactions with the brand to identify what does and doesn’t work.

“Delving deep means going beyond a sum of complaints”, said Taylor. “You’re looking for the moments that truly matter to customers and areas of opportunity within those key touchpoints to make their journey more seamless.” In this context, moments that matter represent the most meaningful inflection points that the customer feels.

For example, let’s say that a sales rep does four out of five interactions flawlessly, yet if the one that’s missed counts the most in terms of building a strong relationship, that becomes a true “moment that matters”.

This is where customer journey mapping comes into play. Customer journey mapping is a research method aimed at comprehending the end-to-end customer experience with a company, its products and people, and even its ordering platform.

By mapping out the customer journey, your business can gain valuable insights into customers' emotions, motivations, and pain points throughout their interactions – before, during, and after a purchase.

Unlike traditional surveys and other quantitative data methods that provide point-in-time feedback, holistic journey mapping looks at the complete process to help brands build more meaningful relationships with their customers.

A well-researched customer journey map serves as a visual timeline of what customers are thinking, feeling, and doing at crucial moments. This creative process helps to identify the following:?

• Any gaps in coverage or areas not working effectively for customers so sellers can take action.
• Preferred paths to purchase (per persona) so you can more accurately predict customers’ behaviors.?

By analyzing all interactions from the customer’s perspective rather than just focusing on sales’ point-of-view or your own, diverse teams can readily unify over a shared vision of positive CX-led change.

Understanding the Customer Journey?

Customer decision-making is influenced by the tasks they must accomplish to move forward in the process and how they feel during each step. By focusing on the customer journey, you can prioritize which issues to address directly based on their importance to your business. Delivering the right experiences at the right time can help to differentiate your brand from the competition and elevate customer experience.

Lenovo's Approach to Customer Journey Mapping

Lenovo recently embarked on an extensive research project to gain deeper insights into the end-to-end experience of our Business-to-Business (B2B) customers.?

In my experience, enterprise-level customer journey mapping can be challenging since B2B journeys are typically more complex than Business-to-Consumer (B2C) journeys. Case in point, consumer journeys often revolve around a single individual and their online or in-store experiences, whereas in B2B, decision-making authority may involve several individuals or a formal procurement process.

Our research project analyzed customer journeys in six markets across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America, and various business segments, including commercial enterprises, small-and-medium-sized businesses (SMB), and our channel partners. The journey was divided into five stages:

1. Purchase?
2. Deliver/Setup?
3. Use and Support?
4. Fix?
5. Renew

To kickstart the project, internal workshops were conducted involving Lenovo sales representatives, account managers, and senior managers representing different geographies and segments. These initial workshops helped streamline the customer journey map and provided valuable input from frontline staff on what moments they assumed customers would identify as positive or negative. These insights led to more fruitful external discussions when our researchers engaged with over 130 customers to confirm or refute internally gathered perspectives.

Later, when chatting with Heidi about the project’s success, she said, “Yes, customer journey mapping helped us uncover crucial insights about customers’ interactions with Lenovo by identifying overlaps in sentiment and/or any blind spots between the two respondent groups on what truly mattered.” Read on to learn what we found out.

3 Insights from Lenovo’s Business Customer Journey Mapping

1. Spotted Differences Across Regions: For example, the research revealed that SMB and large enterprise (LE) customers in Brazil and India are more likely to be neutral on most Moments that Matter, while North America, EMEA, and Australia customers gave us more varied feedback on our strengths and the areas they’d like to see improvements. Also, both LE and SMB customers seek a lot of information in the purchase stage, from understanding their product choices to tech shows, events, and Demo Kits.
2. The Beginning Point for Business Customers: Regardless of the customer or partner type, business customers typically start their journey by learning about the offerings and engaging with Lenovo's sales teams. Establishing a solid relationship with the sales team emerged as a critical early step for all customer segments. Our research showed the relationship between partners and their trusted Lenovo advisor as a top strength.
3. Steps Involved in the Customer Journey: Beyond the purchase, there are several essential steps in the customer journey, such as product delivery, setup, product usage, issue resolution, and renewal or repurchase. By understanding the successes and obstacles at each stage, Lenovo can optimize the journey and provide a smoother experience.

Customer Journey Mapping Improves the Customer Experience

Customer journey mapping provides businesses with insights into areas of friction or opportunities for improvement. For our Channel partners, their ability to contact support isn’t always as smooth as they’d like, so we’re already diving in to see how to make it a world-class experience.

Thanks to journey mapping, sales teams better appreciate how our customers/partners feel about their interactions at different times, helping them better understand, empathize with them, and address the challenge. Plus, insights gathered regarding certain words that our customers use have helped us refocus our Natural Language Process (NLP) strategy to crawl online reviews for more representative phrases.

Ready to Get Started with Customer Journey Mapping?

Here are four tips to help ensure your journey mapping project is a success:

1. It’s essential to engage with your internal stakeholders and colleagues first.
2. Gather feedback from various departments and regions to help your company uncover its own biases and assumptions about customer experiences.
3. Then, compare internal perspectives with external feedback to identify areas of alignment and misalignment.
4. Allow the map to inform your overall CX program, guiding the development of new listening posts, surveys, and/or data analysis methodologies aligned with the journey stages.

In closing, customer journey mapping is a great way to put yourself in your customer’s shoes for any industry. Walk with them as they discuss their thoughts and feelings at different inflection points with your company. Let them be honest with you, accept their feedback, and use it to make your business more responsive to customers.

About the Author

Dilip Bhatia is Lenovo’s Chief Customer Experience Officer and Vice President of User & Customer Experience, PC & Smart Devices. As Lenovo’s Chief Customer Officer, Dilip drives the company to be the leader in the PC, smart device, data center, and mobility space.