Five Reasons to Drive your Omni-channel Strategy via Journey Mapping
Customer Journey Mapping is the ideal platform and approach from which to define and build your overall omni-channel strategy.
Companies across different industries are trying to determine how best to serve their customers across both digital and physical channels.
Customers are demanding a seamless, cross-channel customer experience, catering to their individual needs of "whenever I want, wherever I am, and whatever I need".
Here are five reasons why using customer journey mapping is such a powerful approach to informing your omni-channel strategy:
1. Journey Mapping starts by asking the question of "Who's journey are you mapping?"
By asking this question, you begin to segment your customer base and define the specific persona(s) you are looking to better serve through your products and services. You can't meet the expectations of everyone, therefore, its' important to define more specifically whom you are trying to serve. Most companies will have from three to five persona that serve as their ideal customers.
2. Journey Mapping helps you look at the end-to-end journey for the customer; not simply interactions with a single function (e.g., sales, customer service, billing, etc.).
In looking at the end-to-end journey, as a cross-functional team, you are able to bring together individuals from across the organization to see the journey through the "eyes of the customer". This collaborative, cross-functional process can begin to help you break down the silos that often get in the way of you being able to deliver the experience your customer desires. A large majority of customer complaint are related to being transferred across organizations within a company when trying to get an issue or problem resolved.
3. Journey Mapping helps you focus on the touch points most important to the customer.
While all interactions or touch points with your company can impact overall customer experience, not all touch points have equal importance, and therefore, it is critical that you understand which touch points have the highest level of importance to your customer (by persona) at different stages of the journey. What are those moments of truth which get people to transition from one stage of the journey to the next?
4. Journey Mapping helps you gain a better understanding of the emotional state of your customer at different stages of the customer journey.
Building an emotional connection to your customer is what creates that "bond" so important to loyalty. Unless you can empathize with your customer at each stage of the journey, get into their head and understand what they are doing, thinking, and feeling at each stage of the journey, you will be unable to design an experience which meets these unstated wants and needs.
5. Journey Mapping helps you prioritize and align as an organization on which touchpoints matter most to your customer and what should be fixed.
By identifying key CX performance gaps along the journey you are able to focus your experience design efforts on what matters most to your customers, those touchpoints which most negatively affect their perception and/or experience with the brand. These touchpoints can then be incorporated into your overall CX improvement roadmap by stage of journey and channel.
Two Primary Types of Journey Maps
There are two primary types of journey maps each with their own unique goals and objectives.
Current State Journey Map
A current state journey map is used to define customer experience as it “perceived” today. Remember, customer experience is always based upon the "perception" of the customer. It defines What is? from a Design Thinking context.
A current state journey map helps you:
Identify the expectations, wants and needs of a targeted persona (ideal customer) at each stage of the journey;
Identify the various touchpoints that exist today at each stage of the journey;
Identify the context (stage of journey or specific touchpoint) in which a customer's expectations, wants or needs are not met (performance gap); and
Align all stakeholders on the most critical CX performance gaps to be addressed in the ideal state.
It helps you assess customer expectations, determine unmet needs, and prioritize pain points across the various stages of the customer journey.
Ideal State Journey Map
An ideal state journey map is used to define the customer experience as we would like it to be “perceived” in the future. It defines What if? or What Wows? from a Design Thinking context. How pain points identified in the current state journey map are addressed and resolved.
An ideal state journey map helps you:
Identify how new or modified Touchpoints at different stages in the journey might address specific performance gaps or unmet needs;
Identify how potentially eliminating a given Touchpoint might better serve the customer;
Create an understanding of an improved or optimal guest experience moving forward; and
Align all stakeholders on any new/modified Touchpoints required to delivery new guest experience
It helps you envision what the customer experience will look like and feel like once you have addressed critical CX performance gaps at different stages of the customer journey.
So while it's extremely important to start with a better understanding of the current state journey map. The ultimate or end goal of customer experience design is to meet or exceed customer expectations through your products and services. The ideal state journey map helps you and your team align on what that might look like.
According to Forrester, less than 30% of companies doing customer journey mapping are defining the ideal state (building an ideal state journey map).
It's a journey! I've seen this process work first hand across many different industries (e.g., automotive, finance, retail, healthcare, etc.) and am happy to share with you my learnings.