Top 5 Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping
- Reading Time: 6 minutes
Customer journey mapping is the broad, visualized process of seeing your brand through your customer’s eyes rather than your own. It forces you to focus on your customer’s emotions and how your brand feeds into them. This gives you some immediate and clear-cut benefits.
It shows you pain points and points out areas of frustration
You can see exactly where customers get frustrated, either between touchpoints or at individual touchpoints, and from there gives you the ability to optimize them. If a specific touchpoint is leading to churn, or is clearly a problematic step in a journey, then it’ll show up in the data and allow you to take action from there. Or if there’s a gap along the customer’s journey that shouldn’t be there, a map gives you a clear sense for what and how to fill those gaps.
In addition to improving the customer journey, it also helps to identify in which areas users are most engaged and/or satisfied, as well as where they spend the most time. It can highlight these points and keep the customer moving on to the next step of their journey.
Gathering quantitative & qualitative data on your audience
When you map out the entire customer journey, what that does is it gives you the ability to pinpoint both where you need to change, and the data on how to change it. Likewise, it gives you data on what’s working best for you. In short, by separating out each touchpoint on a journey map, you’re able to collect both more data on each touchpoint, and also data that can lead to meaningful action. And because the data is collected as part of a larger map, it means that data can be unified into a seamless whole rather than being piecemeal.For example, surveys and quizzes are easy ways to engage with your customer and determine which step of the journey they appreciate most. These can be administered in a variety of different ways, over app, online, telephone, face-to-face, mail surveys, and observational data. There are different sets of pros and cons to different data collection methods (for instance, face-to-face is time consumer, involves bias, and can be expensive, but may weed out the biases inherent in app responders), but in each case the survey data should produce clear answers that point to particular actions (for instance, replacing an unpopular service or model with a more popular one).
For example, surveys and quizzes are easy ways to engage with your customer and determine which step of the journey they appreciate most. These can be administered in a variety of different ways, over app, online, telephone, face-to-face, mail surveys, and observational data. There are different sets of pros and cons to different data collection methods (for instance, face-to-face is time consumer, involves bias, and can be expensive, but may weed out the biases inherent in app responders), but in each case the survey data should produce clear answers that point to particular actions (for instance, replacing an unpopular service or model with a more popular one).
It reduces costs
Brands that use customer journey maps experience ten times the level of improvement in the cost of customer satisfaction, according to the Aberdeen Group. This makes sense, as it’s essentially the brands that are deciding to invest in their customers before something goes wrong rather than those waiting until they experience churn before throwing vast sums of money at the problem. When you map out the customer journey, it means you’re increasing customer satisfaction and increasing the chances that your customers will pass on your brand to others.
It increases conversions
As with the previous example, the same study showed that customer journey mapping led to 56% more revenue from upselling and cross-selling, which again isn’t overly surprising. As customers feel that their needs and emotions are being answered, they will respond with their wallets.
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It increases not just customer satisfaction, but employee satisfaction as well
Customer satisfaction is actually a full virtuous circle. Unhappy customers are a weight about customer service, which leads to greater degrees of disgruntled employees. And vice-versa, when customers are happy, it means that employees are convinced their own work is meaningful and fulfilling.
Mapping can be useful in determining KPIs, and vice versa
Understanding your customers and their journey allows you to optimize your own key performance indicators, or KPIs. When you have a full sense of the journey customers go through, this allows you to recalibrate your KPIs specifically to what your customers are going through and trim off any part of KPIs that don’t correspond to how your customers perceive your product. Likewise, tracking the customer journey by looking at it through the lens of KPIs can help you optimize the journey directly to those KPIs.
Things to consider when journey mapping
Like every other thing you can do for your company, customer journey maps are not a cure-all. They won’t turn a shoddy product into a best-seller. But there are other related issues with customer journey mapping that you’ll need to think about to keep your company moving forward.
Dont’ be worried that they are isolated to the product and don’t take outside influences into account
This isn’t a problem, because customer journey mapping DOES show you where problems occur. So even if problems might not be from within the experience you’re providing (for example, perhaps a global depression is hurting sales), you still can see which touchpoints are being most affected and act accordingly.
It doesn’t allow for early testing
If you’re in the beta version of your product, perhaps you know there will be hiccups but want to get a sense of how one particular feature is working in the market. Spending time mapping out the entire journey when you know the journey will be suboptimal to begin with may be a waste of time in this instance.
Make sure you map correctly, human influence is possible anywhere, anytime!
This is normal for any analysis, but human beings are bad at looking at things through prisms other than their own. This means that oftentimes, companies will pick the customer journey most suitable to them rather than the journey the customers are actually going on.
Key Takeaways
Customer journey mapping is a process whereby the entire experience of your customer(s) is mapped out touchpoint by touchpoint. What this does is let you easily visualize exactly what your customer is going through as they discover your project, and therefore see how to optimize the experience for them. This allows you to see exactly where the problem touchpoints may arise, and it lets you collect data across the board that will be useful for anything you want to do going forward. It helps reduce costs while increasing sales. All of which will have a positive effect both on employee and customer satisfaction. In short, mapping out the entire journey up front may take some time, but it’ll both help your company and save time in the long run in ways necessary for the growth of your business.
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