3 Powerful Tips to Map Your Customer Journey

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Okay, you started this year with a big resolution, “we’re becoming a customer centric company!” “We’re putting the customer at the centre of everything!”

Great, but where to start?

One of the best ways–and we’re seeing our clients using this over and over again–is by mapping the customer journey. This means the journey your customers go through when they buy (or not) something from you. By doing this exercise, you can really put yourself in your customers shoes and start understanding.

Have seen many of these processes run by our clients, we can summarise the 3 most important best practises for the first timers:

1. Start Small

Definitely don’t try to identify at once all possible customer journeys, for all products, for all customers. Chances are that you will spend lot of time doing this, get bored, and possibly give up (but the fun starts later). We suggest you start maybe with one product or with a particular customer segment, ideally the most valuable ones. Once that’s decided, start brainstorming all the different touchpoints a customer who would buy that particular product has with your company. These are things like store, or website, call centre, fulfillment, etc. Once that’s done for your target segment, move on. You’ll always be able to come back later and iterate.

2. Set Goals

For each touchpoint you identified, try to understand what it would take to make a great experience for that touchpoint. Something you think every customer would expect. For example, on your website touchpoint customers will want to easily find out what they look for, they will want that to be available, and they will want to purchase it seamlessly. Or for your call centre they will want to get hold of an agent quickly and having their problem solved immediately. Having listed these aspects for each touchpoint is helpful because it guides you to what needs to be measured.

3. Use It or Lose It

Up until now, your customer journey is simply a list of touchpoints with some goals, but here’s the key part. Turning that list into metrics that can be measured (using techniques like Net Promoter Score or Customer Effort Score) is what will drive the success of your initiative. By measuring every single transaction between you and your customers you’ll be able to clearly identify the weak points of your customer journey and improve them. This is probably the most important step because it will justify all the effort you spent, show you clear results, and get buy in from your team members. And when this loop is complete, you’ll be able to start again, tackling more customer journeys and transforming your company in a truly customer centric organisation.

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In the modern Digital Age, advances in technology and communication, combined with the explosive growth in data information, have given rise to a more empowered global customer. Recent economic and political events highlight the need for organizations to understand how consumers view the world and the most important attributes for their purchasing decisions.

Thus, increasingly more organizations are seeking to invest and focus on Customer-centric Design. A clear understanding of customer needs and behaviors across the organization will help drive profitable growth strategies and provide the confidence to invest in opportunities at a time when staying within budget can be extremely difficult.

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