Customer Experience: Steps to Managing the Customer Journey
A customer journey is an entire experience a customer has while communicating with a brand. It considers the complete interaction roadmap from brand discovery to purchasing and beyond. The focus isn’t on transactions, but rather how the customer feels after interactions with the brand.
Before you can improve the customer journey, you need to map it out. Customer Journey maps are effective mechanism for conveying information in a way that is memorable, concise, and creates a shared vision. Discovering steps in the journey of interconnections enables you to address customers’ pain points, remove fragmentation, create a better experience for your customers, and discover opportunities to delight.
This isn’t a one off exercise. A well-honed Customer Experience makes the difference between a one-time transactional customer and a loyal advocate of your product or service.
Step to Managing the Customer Journey:
Develop Your Customer Experience (CX) Strategy
Use brand vision, mission and values, along with voice of the customer, to create a guiding principles framework with CX score goals. Click here to get your CX Maturity Assessment.
Collate Customer Touchpoints
Map channels and customer touchpoints with related interaction types across the organization. Identify interactions that are representative or indicative of the current Customer Experience.
Map The Current Customer Journey
Know the current journeys and the bounce points that define the experience. Include the internal and external hand off points and the key customer outcome.
Add Customer Experience Hotspots
Overlay CX pain or pressure points onto the customer journey maps to connect negative issues with potential CX improvement opportunities.
Translate Hotspots Into Actions
Group hotspots by agreed categories e.g., proposition and policy, process, people, technology, and organizational structure.
Redesign the Journey Maps
Using the guiding design protocols and mapped hotspots, map out the target state customer journey.
Align CX Improvements with Business Processes and Innovate relentlessly
Finally, translate target customer journey maps into action and goals around business innovation, improvement, and operational deployment.
