How to build an effective Customer Journey?

“With $83 billion lost to poor customer experiences each year, it’s never been more evident the critical impact that your brand experience has on your bottom line. And while today’s consumer is seamlessly communicating across all channels, most brands are still trying to manage those relationships via touchpoints. Now is the time to go beyond traditional touchpoints―building real relationships and creating a customer journey like never before.”

The State of Marketing 2013, IBM’s Global Survey of Marketers

What is a customer journey?

Think of the customer journey as a roadmap describing how a customer becomes aware of your brand, his interactions with your brand–and beyond. Here’s the customer journey definition:

The customer journey is the total sum of experiences that customers go through while interacting with your organization. The customer journey doesn’t focus on a part of transaction or experience, instead it clubs the full experience of being a customer.

What does a customer journey look like?

Elements of a Customer Journey

Image Credit: http://www.customerchampions.co.uk/customer-journey-mapping-cjm/

How to build an effective customer journey?

Designing a customer journey is easy. It allows you to better understand and identify your customers’ patterns, expectations and goals. Effective customer journey is directly proportionate to higher customer retention and lower customer serving costs.

Here are 7 ways to build an effective customer journey:

1. Understand your customer behavior: It’s important that you understand what motivates your customers – their needs, concerns and hesitations. Map out their paths from first interaction to the last to analyze their goals.

2. Define the behavioral stages: The behavioral stages of every customer are different. It is important to know the step-by-step experiences of customers. Some common customer stages include: Discovering, researching, exploring, choosing and purchasing. By outlining these customer stages you can understand what customers need as they move through the journey.

3. Align customer goals with the stages: Customer journey isn’t about your company’s goals, it’s about your customer’s goals. Your customer journey should identify the customers’ goals clearly in order to identify the touch points required to support customers in acquiring those goals. If your customer is seeking education about a product and you fail to provide that education resource touch point, then that is a mismatch.

4. Identify varied touch points: Your customer interacts with your organization in numerous ways such as, face-to-face meetings, emails, phone calls, product demos, etc. Plot out the touch points where your customers are engaging with you more and where you are supporting them in achieving their goals. Make sure you map out every encounter that your customer has with your brand.

5. Map out the time frames: Real customer data is the foundation base of a customer journey. You should survey your customers and extract data from customer analytics to identify your touch points, phases, etc. Also analyze how long touch points take to turn to effective ones.

6. Define what teams are involved in the journey: No single team is involved in building a customer journey. At different time frames, different people are involved in making a customer journey. Make sure that all team-members contribute to the process and serve the customers effectively. It is very important that you keep a transparent view of the interactions that customers have with different teams to provide a unique and remarkable customer experience.

7. Involve the complete organization to create an effective customer experience: Mapping the customer journey is not confined to any particular project team; it requires efforts and involvement across your organization. Creating long-term relationships with customers should be a company-wide initiative. Integrating customer-journey mapping into company-wide strategy enhances the ROI and business outcomes of your organization.

To learn more about optimizing your customer journey effectively, get in touch with our experts.