42% of customers are willing to spend more on products for a great customer experience (PWC) A research report from Aberdeen Group also found that companies with a formal customer journey program are seeing growth year after year that includes:
1. 18 times faster average sales cycles,
2. 56% more cross-selling and upselling revenue,
3. 10-fold improvement in customer service costs,
4. 5 times higher revenue from customer referrals,
5. 54% higher return of marketing investment (ROMI).
How do you ensure that the customer's experience with your company is a positive one? It all starts with mapping the customer journey of your target customers.
A purchase is usually the result of a long process. Customer journey management helps to structure this process and optimally support the potential buyer during the various phases. Depending on the model, the customer journey is divided into approximately four to eight phases. While the person concerned becomes aware of their problem for the first time at the beginning, they move closer to the purchase with each phase. During the various phases, the potential customer comes into contact with the product, service, brand or company in general at various points of contact (also known as touchpoints).
These touchpoints take place on the various channels that the company uses (or makes available) online and offline. For companies that are not yet fully aware of which touchpoints their customers prefer, a touchpoint analysis is an important aspect to support the customer journey.
After the purchase, it is about continuing to retain the person as a customer and, ideally, even turning them into a real fan. With every step, the customer relationship is thus intensified and optimized along the customer journey through customer journey management.
Why is this important?
Customer journey mapping helps companies empathize with their customers in order to improve the customer experience or customer experience. It's not just about thinking like customers, but also understanding their feelings, motivations and other influences on the buying process. The customer journey map visualizes how the customer experience of buyers is to be evaluated. This knowledge must be taken into account when designing all products and services. As a result, higher sales can be achieved despite reduced costs. Because a satisfied customer is happy to buy from you again. Acquiring a new customer is many times more expensive than turning a customer into a long-standing customer.
What is customer journey mapping?
A customer journey map is a visual representation of all interactions a customer has with a brand as part of their customer journey. It represents the customer experience across all touchpoints between the customer and the company. From initial contact to purchasing to the ultimate goal, long-term customer loyalty. It therefore shows where the customer's experience begins and where it ends. What the interaction with the respective product or service looks like and how the touchpoints promote or impair value for the customer. Customers' buying process is based on market research results and provides a map for the entire organization. For example, the company can see where revenue is lost, which personas need to be prioritized, or which touchpoints still need to be assigned to the responsible department.
What does an ideal and useful card look like?
There are certainly various methods. Journey maps combine two powerful tools (storytelling and visualization) to help teams understand and respond to customer needs. Storytelling and visualization are essential facets of journey mapping, as they are effective mechanisms for conveying information in a memorable and concise way and creating a shared vision.
Fragmented understanding is chronic in organizations where KPIs are assigned and measured by individual department or group, as many organizations never compose the entire experience from the user's perspective. This shared vision is a key goal of journey mapping. Because without them, there would never be an agreement on how to improve the customer experience.
Journey mapping creates a holistic view of the customer experience, and it is this process of bringing together and visualizing disparate data points that can involve otherwise disinterested stakeholders from all groups and inspire joint conversations and change. While maps take on a variety of forms depending on context and business goals, certain elements are generally included, and there are basic guidelines that must be followed for them to be most successful. From our point of view, important elements of a customer journey map are: touchpoints, customer quotes, the time horizon for each step, customer engagement, customer needs and pain points, and the impact that these changes can have. The following steps will help you get an insight into such a map:
1. Describe the buying process.
2. Identify touchpoints.
3. Identify and describe personas
4. Describe the customer journey for individual personas
5. Evaluate customer experiences.
6. Mark key factors.
The map could summarize that the website should be used as the most important orientation tool for customers and that the role of the retailer would not yet be geared to customer expectations.
How do I go about creating it?
1. Understanding customers and collecting experiences
Much more than demographics and interests is needed for a deep understanding of customers. In order to be able to provide a broad information base about customers and to capture aspects such as customer needs, emotions, decision makers and touchpoints, proven areas of sophisticated market research methods help. The insights collected in this way are used to segment the market and record the archetypical experiences of the individual segments in so-called customer journey maps.
2. Define goals
Clear and measurable goals are essential for a successful process within a company. It is therefore of utmost urgency to set goals for this implementation in advance. The target system of every customer experience manager should include economic targets (e.g. sales, turnover, costs, margin, etc.) as well as behavioural, psychographic variables (e.g. preference, willingness to buy, cross-selling, customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, recommendation, etc.). The target system formulated in this way forms the indispensable basis for consistent controlling.
3. Design customer experiences
Your customers collect impressions every time they interact with you and thus form their opinion about your company. They share the positive and negative experiences along their customer journey with other people: A bad review, an enthusiastic tweet, a recommendation to a friend. You should make sure that your customers have a consistent image of your company, no matter how and when they get in touch with you.
4. Create structures and capabilities
This step consists of two parts: The internal and external areas. The internal implementation plan describes what needs to be procured, developed or changed in order to be able to deliver the target customer experience at all on the part of the company. Elements such as processes, structures, employees, knowledge, skills, technologies, tools, information and culture are described. On the other hand, there is the external sector: Implementation vis-à-vis the customer, which addresses the customer's experiences with the company (see next point; 5th implementation).
5. Implementation
The fifth step deals with the customer's relationship with the company, i.e. the practical implementation of the principle. In doing so, we look at the positive change in the relationship with the company, as well as which processes should be adapted to them, which channels are suitable and which technologies and tools need to be promoted for implementation in practice.
6. Measure and adjust
In order to be able to determine the success of the implementation, success checks are carried out. The aim is to ensure that the goals set out in point two are achieved and to take corrective action in the event of discrepancies.
Putting the customer at the center of your company is no longer an option, but rather a prerequisite for a successful business for the next financial year. Both for ongoing growth and scaling. Power has shifted significantly from the brand to the consumer. As a result, companies that have a customer journey strategy can reduce costs, improve sales performance and operate more profitably overall. Customer journey mapping is therefore an important tool for the operational and strategic development of products, services and companies. The importance of customer journey mapping, especially for the strategic development of a company, is often underestimated. Because especially in the course of digitalization, companies run the risk of losing influence on their customers because they define their customer journey too briefly. This means that these companies are entering their customers' customer journey too late and do not offer any points of interaction with their own product in the first important steps.
