Whether you are a large enterprise or a small business, today understanding and knowing your customer is not a good to have, but a must-have ability. Customers have varied choices and preferences. To keep the business moving toward growth, offering quality products and services is crucial. This is possible only when businesses can create seamless and positive customer journeys.
This is where customer journey mapping or CJM can help businesses. It can be instrumental in letting enterprises know about the major issues and challenges that the customers face in their journey.
This article will walk us through the benefits, key stages, tools, and techniques for CJM. We shall also be looking at some real-life examples in action.
Benefits of Integrating CJM in Business Process Management
Rather than a simple buzzword, customer journey mapping is a strategic approach that lets businesses gain insight into the customer pain points.
Here is how CJM enables businesses:
- Deep Understanding of Customers: CJM can be termed as an interface into the hearts and minds of the customers. Mapping their journey helps organizations to go deeper into the thoughts and the struggles at all touchpoints. Once these crucial aspects are known, it is simpler to upgrade or modify the offerings.
- Process Improvement: CJM is greatly instrumental in letting businesses know about the shortcomings of their processes. They can learn if their processes are too complicated to understand for the customer. Or is there a roadblock in the communication channel? Identifying such challenges can help them smoothen out the complexities and make it easier for the customers to engage and interact.
- Better Customer Satisfaction: Customer happiness is directly proportional to customer loyalty. The higher the optimization of business processes based on customer needs and expectations, the better the customer experience. An enjoyable experience with a business translates into a higher satisfaction score. Moreover, this can lead to passive word-of-mouth marketing which is eventually helpful for businesses.
Key Stages of Customer Journey Mapping
The key stages of customer journey mapping are:
Define Your Customer Persona
Before starting the mapping process, it is essential to understand the customer. This can be created by evaluating the most regular customers. Here, businesses will need to focus on a specific segment that will be mapped for the journey. This will help businesses learn about the unique needs and expectations of these customers.
The following characteristics can be a good starting point:
- Name
- Age
- Job role
- Family status
- Personal goals
- Professional goals
Data about these points can be derived from surveys, customer interviews, and other insight reports.
Choosing a Customer Journey for Mapping
Determine which customer journey map to create, and then create a behavior line. This could be a renewal, a new customer journey, or resolving a product problem. You might also decide on this depending on which client trips are the most profitable or frequent.
Mapping the Journey
This step will require the businesses to ask these questions:
- What views do customers have?
- What emotions do they currently have?
- What procedures or events take place during this journey?
- What is the moment that truly matters? Identify this make-or-break moment and optimize it to leverage the moment. But in addition to figuring out when it is, you also need to figure out what your client’s demands are.
- Lastly, how can you gauge how well you are fulfilling the needs of your customers at every stage of the process? Establish KPIs to monitor the progress of the customer journey map and experience.
Innovate and Measure
Create a list of concrete steps to solve problems and take advantage of opportunities based on your findings. This can entail creating a new customer service training program, revamping the user experience of a website, or optimizing a process.
Sort the improvements you’ve found into priority lists according to their viability and possible impact. Create a strategy to put these changes into action and assess their success.
Tools and Techniques for CJM
Your customer journey map is intended to do more than just enhance the user experience. Process mapping consultants can help you enhance your business results by generating an accurate client journey map.
Organizations undergo radical change when they are able to connect operational data to important customer journey touchpoints. This is due to the fact that enhancing some aspects of the client journey will directly affect your company.
Another technique that can be adopted is to rope in process design consultants. Process design consultants are responsible for strategizing and carrying out plans and identifying any business opportunities. Alternatively, business process consulting firms can be extremely helpful in carrying out the process of CJM. They are equipped with teams that hold expertise in leveraging CJM data to improve processes.
Real-Life Examples of CJM in Action
Let’s now look at this real-life example of the CJM:
Hubspot’s Customer Journey Map
Businesses utilize HubSpot’s map template because of its ease of use. Additionally, it arranges various content kinds according to journey stages. It depicts the five main phases that potential customers go through, according to this classic CJM. These are awareness, deliberation, choice, retention, and loyalty.
Based on these factors, businesses can develop strategies for process improvements.
About BPX
BPX is a team of distinguished business process consultants with over a decade of expertise, serving a global client base across more than 12 countries. Our team specializes in business process improvement, offering a comprehensive range of services including process mapping and process improvement consulting.
We pride ourselves on tailoring our strategies to meet the unique needs of each client, leveraging our extensive experience to drive efficiency, enhance productivity, and foster growth.
As your partner, BPX commits to transforming your operations through innovative and effective solutions, ensuring your business not only meets but surpasses its operational goals. Choose BPX for unparalleled expertise in process consulting.
FAQs
A customer’s journey depicting their challenges in interacting with a business can be mapped out using customer journey mapping, or CJM. It is a process of recording all events the customers engage in with your company, from research to purchase and beyond. With the help of CJM, businesses can see things from their point of view and identify any problems or difficulties by speculating on their journey.
This process is important since satisfied consumers also turn out to be loyal customers. CJM aids in pinpointing problem areas. By simplifying complex processes, you give your clients a more enjoyable experience, which increases their satisfaction and loyalty.
Furthermore, CJM offers insightful data on consumer behavior that lets you customize your products and marketing plans to meet their particular requirements. To put it briefly, CJM is an effective method for getting to know your clients and tailoring your operations to maximize their performance. This will ultimately result in improved outcomes in terms of revenue and profits.
Customer journey mapping provides insight into the customer’s preferences and choices. Thus, it helps in bridging the gap. Here is how journey mapping improves BPM:
- Identification of Pain Points: CJM highlights the touchpoints that inconvenienced the clients along the way. For example, consider a complicated and cumbersome web-based payment procedure. CJM will help identify order processing system inefficiencies and help identify areas in need of improvement.
- Data-Driven Optimization: At every touchpoint, journey maps offer information on customer behavior and emotions. These are essential for an efficient BPM as now prioritizing improvement based on actual consumer needs is possible.
- Customer-Centric Design: By utilizing the data generated from the journey mapping, BPM may create processes that improve customer experience while still operating efficiently. Consider an e-commerce business that streamlines checkout processes according to the client journey, resulting in a quicker and more convenient procedure.
- Constant Feedback Loop: CJM is critical when it comes to generating customer feedback, which is a continuous process. By continuously improving processes, BPM can make sure that they meet changing client expectations.
The best customer journey mapping or the CJM tool for you will depend on your needs and financial situation. Companies may utilize dedicated or generic tools for customer journey mapping.
Dedicated tools are like instruments with a wide range of capabilities designed exclusively for CJM are available. These tools will help businesses with activities such as the ability to create complete customer personas, integrate data points for a more comprehensive view, and create visually appealing trip maps. However, it must be noted that these tools need a subscription charge.
You shall also come across some general tools that let you create simple travel maps with real-time collaborative capabilities and are often more affordable and a good point to start with. This is an excellent way to sketch out the customer experience while working with coworkers. These tools do not offer the features that are offered by specialized CJM software.
Finally, there are templates. Online templates can act as pre-built blueprints, providing a helpful starting point for your journey map. Additionally, customer feedback tools can be utilized to give you valuable data. These include survey results or website recordings, to add depth and real-world insights to your map.
Author Bio
Rupal Agarwal
Chief Strategy Officer
Dr. Rupal’s “Everything is possible” attitude helps achieve the impossible. Dr. Rupal Agarwal has worked with 300+ companies from various sectors, since 2012, to custom-build SOPs, push their limits and improve performance efficiency. Rupal & her team have remarkable success stories of helping companies scale 10X with business process standardization.