Is your brand experience a ride to remember? Ideally, you want your customers on board for the entire journey, enjoying the experience so much they never want it to end.
Get a big-picture of your customer’s total experience by mapping your customer journey. Your map will show your customer’s experience with your brand, from first contact to every brand touch point and interaction, from their point-of-view.
Typically done as an infographic or flowchart, the customer journey map shows touch points like attracting a customer, closing the first sale, renewing a service or upgrading a product, up-selling and cross-selling initiatives, and all the minute interactions along the way.
Your customer journey map can help you pinpoint the key moments where your brand may be losing business or need additional support to make a sale. Those are your opportunities to make a difference!
Twenty years ago, the customer journey was a straightforward, linear path from attracting the customer to making the sale.
Rapidfire technological advances in marketing such as the proliferation of digital channels, the iPhone, marketing automation and wearable tech have exponentially increased touch points for your brand.
Now, the customer journey is an intricate web of multiple and intersecting online, mobile and social paths.
The digital roadmap is a companion piece for your customer journey map, typically done for a 5 to 10 year period. The digital roadmap clearly outlines your company’s current or upcoming (planned) digital infrastructure projects, so you know your brand’s capacity for enhancing the customer journey. It shows what future technology may be on the horizon, possible challenges ahead, and new opportunities to integrate new ways to engage and delight your customers, and ultimately change your customer’s perceptions of your brand.
With a map in hand, you’re less likely to get lost.
There’s no need to boil the ocean to revamp your entire customer journey. Your customer journey map and digital roadmap are tools that provide insights on your customer’s expectations, identifies gaps where your business may be at risk, and isolates the key moments where you can enhance your customer journey. So where do you start?
1. Interview Your Stakeholders
Talk to employees in sales, customer service and other key departments and focus the feedback on pain points and opportunities to improve. Layer that with the customers’ point of view, from surveys and anecdotal evidence. This should help you isolate the key moments and insights that could inform and more important, differentiate your new customer journey.
2. Identify Opportunities to Enhance Your Customer Journey
Audit the journey looking for opportunities, the touch points that are now stale or declining in engagement, and where additional support or effort could close the sale.
3. Develop Strategies to Improve Engagement and a Positive Customer Experience
For example, you might find your customers are experiencing a pain point when they email your company, and you request that they fill out a form. By providing a more personalized response for example, access to a LIVE chat attendant, you could keep your customers feeling more positively about your brand.
4. Change, Measure, Tweak and Repeat
Execute the change. Measure the results. Tweak and repeat, until you achieve your strategic objectives.
Small changes across the spectrum of your customer journey can yield impressive results.
An impartial perspective can help you see the big picture more clearly. Companies like BLUERUSH provide consultative services to help your team develop a comprehensive Customer Journey Map and Digital Roadmap as a strategic package, identifying easy, actionable opportunities that can make all the difference to your customer journey.
Let’s talk about your needs.
Stay tuned for Part 2…
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