How customer journey mapping helps brands create ‘moments that matter’

Martie De Beer, executive for contact centres at Telviva.

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Every business’s bread and butter is its customers. Yet, not all businesses appreciate that the best product or service in the world does not guarantee a sale or customer retention. One of the most important things a business can do is to map its customer journey and improve and optimise its customer experience (CX).

At its simplest, customer journey mapping is you, as an organisation, putting yourselves in the shoes of your customers to experience what they experience. You do this to ask: What experience do my customers currently have and what experience do I want them to have with my brand?

“Touch points” refers to how customers engage with your systems, processes and people. Where do they “touch” the business? Customer journey mapping, and deeply understanding all the touch points, is an incredibly rewarding exercise, but to get the most out of it, you must have clearly defined objectives.

A thorough customer journey map enables you to understand your customers’ behaviour, pain points, expectations and preferences. This is vital to stop repeating the same mistakes.

The exercise empowers you to improve your customer satisfaction levels. Let’s be honest, customers often give feedback either directly or through their actions, but these insights end up in a deep hole of nothingness, for lack of a better description. Many businesses don’t use satisfaction scores, net promoter scores or the voice of the customer effectively. What would effective look like? At what point in the customer journey did we get this feedback? Which channel was used, and is it the channel that resulted in a good or bad experience? Was it after a sales issue or a faulty product or service?

A good customer mapping exercise enables better strategic alignment in the various business messaging channels. Imagine receiving a host of different communication from the same business where the wording, key messaging, style and platform are different. No doubt you’ll have doubts about clicking on call-to-action links in an era where fraud is rampant. Businesses that need their customers to respond, especially related to customer feedback, must get this right because these touch points are crucial.

Perhaps the most exciting benefit is identifying opportunities for enhancement and change. Consider this: we live in an era of evolving technology and the need to adapt our systems and processes. But, if I change one dimension in my system, what impact will it have on my customers? If an organisation is actively managing its customer journey, it will know exactly whether a system change will have a positive or negative impact on its customers, and what to do about it.

A less obvious but very important benefit is the ability to strategically align and standardise customer feedback; in other words, how you collect the voice of the customer. The value of working with a partner who has experience across a broad range of customers cannot be overstated. As everyone knows, there are multiple quantitative and qualitative methods of gathering customer feedback. However, many organisations have different feedback mechanisms at different touch points or on different channels.

For example: they may send out an e-mail asking to rate the service on a scale of one to 10, but send an SMS or WhatsApp at another time asking the customer to rate the service as great, good or bad. Where on the scale of one to 10 does great, good or bad begin and end? It is clear that businesses need to be able to make sense of their data or it won’t provide the insight needed to improve.

An active approach to mapping the customer journey allows businesses to standardise how and when it collects the voice of the customer. A good partner will know what doesn’t work, and what works incredibly well in terms of increasing the response rate of customers, such as which channels and styles of communication elicit the best response, and when.

Customer feedback

You cannot optimise if you don’t have an accurate understanding of the voice of the customer. If you don’t have a customer feedback strategy in place, then this becomes a priority.

Understand the touch points

There is a great deal of insight that can be gathered from each touch point in a business. A business should interrogate the channels, systems, phone numbers, times of interaction, moments of automation, human-led interactions and more. Is this efficient? How will you know that a customer has left because, while your agents were not annoying them, they were being bombarded by automated messages across channels? A thorough customer journey map takes into account the full view of systems, processes and people.

Define the customer phases or stages

A customer journey map gets pulled into two dimensions, the first being customer phases or stages. There isn’t a universal number of phases as it will depend on your defined objectives. These phases include things such as awareness, acquisition, maintenance and retention. Of course, customers go through a lot during those phases and that leads to the next dimension.

Define the customer steps within the various phases

Here, the map goes into granular detail of the actual steps in each phase. This is about zooming in to all the components of the customer journey precisely because the point of the exercise is to improve and optimise. If a customer has to go through laborious and repetitive steps of filling in his or her details, for example, how can this be addressed with automation?

Map your as-is state and work towards your to-be state

There are many tools that businesses can use to map their customer journey through phases, steps, touch points, systems, processes and people. This involves a great deal of consultative work with your partner but is imperative to accurately capture your as-is state, and then with the experience of your partner, plot a to-be that improves and optimises your customer journey and, ultimately, CX.

Validation

This is an important step, where the organisation and partner interrogate whether everything has been captured and is an accurate representation of the customer journey. This validation enables you to translate the insights into opportunities for optimisation.

The customer journey map needs to be a living document. It needs to be analysed consistently to find opportunities for more improvement and efficiency. Businesses that engage partners for contact centre as a service have the ability to consult with highly experienced teams, with experience and expertise spanning similar and different businesses and industries to find the moments that matter. This is a huge benefit for companies that don’t need to “pay their own school fees” first to learn the hard lessons of making the wrong interventions in the wrong parts of the customer journey.

Similarly, working with an experienced partner will help get the crucial buy-in from employees. It is encouraging how quickly businesses and their staff adapt when moving from traditional call centre environments into an omnichannel contact centre environment, when staff and managers, with the help of their managed service provider, see first-hand the power of using various channels effectively, and the efficiencies unleashed through well-designed automation.

Whether you require a basic solution or a full-function omnichannel operation, Telviva's highly experienced professional service team will help you evaluate the best fit for your needs and your digital journey. Contact us today.