Last week, we highlighted the importance of gathering the right team to make your customer journey dreams come true. Now that we’ve covered the first step in a what can feel like a never-ending process, let’s tackle step number two–mapping out your current customer journey. For more established brands with an already existing customer journey, you should first focus on mapping out your current customer journey. I know, it’s so easy to get ahead of yourselves and dive right into the excitement of dreaming up your ideal customer journey, but it’s so important to understand what is currently happening before diving in too deep into making improvements and changes. Even if you start sharing ideas on how to improve various aspects of the customer journey during this time, remember to stay focused on the current journey and the perceptions customers have about it now. Keeping your team focused on this will help keep the initiative organized and more meaningful in the long run. Better Order Some Extra Post-its...
As you work through figuring out what’s happening right now, there are a few tangible tools to help you through the process. It is usually convenient to have a large, open wall and a big supply of post-it notes. These post-it notes allow everyone participating in this exercise to write down the various touchpoints, and put them up on the wall to visualize a timeline of the customer journey. After this exercise, you will hopefully have a fairly-well mapped out customer journey. Mind the Gaps (But Don’t Just Step Over Them)
After you map out the current customer journey, you might have some gaps in what happens in specific points of the journey warranting further research before your team moves forward. During this research phase, it’s important to capture any customer perception data you can, and include it on your journey map. This could be information such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) for specific touchpoints in the journey, sales metrics, and retention rates. It could also mean taking the time to conduct customer research if your company hasn’t done so lately. This can include a quantitative survey, focus group, or in-person interviews. The goal of this effort is to learn more about what motivates your customers, and what improvements they want to see from your brand. This information will give you great insights into how your customer perceives their experience with your brand, and may even identify areas for improvement. Only after you’ve mapped out your current customer journey and identified your customers’ perceptions and emotional reactions throughout the process can you then start to reimagine your customer journey mapping. But, don’t worry! We’ll be back next week to cover this next step in creating the ideal customer journey. Until then, stay up to date with latest on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
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