Customer-centric is the modern focus Customer Service Managers are seamlessly bringing into their businesses – understand your customer’s needs and solve them intelligently.

Customer & Market Research

Post-pandemic companies are faced with evolving and reimagined consumers, according to Accenture. These customers are less concerned with price and quality and are more concerned about new motivations. Forbes article The Top 100 Most Customer-Centric Companies Of 2022 shared that the focus of customer-centric companies is making their consumers “feel good”. These companies cite successes in COVID relief, customer service mindset, corporate social responsibility, employee experience, and innovative solutions.

Over 50 percent of consumers are willing to switch brands if companies do not align with their values, according to a survey of more than 25,000 consumers across 22 countries. It is crucial to recognize your customer’s motivation behind their decision-making process when developing a successful consumer journey. Does your company’s value proposition match your customers?

Customer Experience (CX)

Customers want to feel valued by your company. Start by understanding every interaction your business has with the customer at every point of their customer journey. Aligning workflows with CX helps businesses build better relationships with customers and in turn increase sales and revenue. The following steps can help you to better understand your customers while creating your customer-centric business journey:

1. Craft a Buyer Persona, a detailed fictional character based on your ideal consumer to keep in mind while making decisions.

2. Map out the customer journey and ask the hard questions:

• Awareness – Are we reaching the target audience?
• Consideration – How do your competitors compare?
• Intent – Can customers easily get information from you?
• Purchase – Does the customer have everything they need and want from your business?
• Loyalty & Advocacy – Will this customer recommend your brand?

3. Gather direct feedback from your customers to ensure customer satisfaction; ask a variety of questions so that you are making proper improvements.

Understanding your customer’s journey is just the beginning, but it’s a big step when establishing a customer-centric workflow. Creating and optimizing CX should be the focus of all operational strategies and changes.

Change Management

To become more customer-centric, businesses must implement several changes in their organizations. Changes always come with risks. Reducing risk with a planned and structured implementation of goals with change management. Change management improves communication, persuasion, leadership, and structure. Creating a customer-focused organization starts with team spirit and avoiding a silo mentality by encouraging a free flow of information. Remember customers are determining all processes; each department should understand the CX point-of-view:

• Marketing
• Sales
• Product Management
• Customer Service (CS)
• Customer Success

Then, they should start reconstructing themselves internally and externally. Job descriptions, training programs, CX systems, corporate values, etc. should be redesigned to help better meet the customers’ needs.

Applying a customer-centric business structure may take years and continuous innovation. While testing out different techniques for your business make sure you have a way to measure your efforts. Ensure you have the proper tools when evaluating your key performance indicators (KPIs). Quality data is power.

CRM & Other Systems

Customer relationship management software is a great tool to help make the best use of your data and track KPIs. Customer relationship management (CRM) software is software systems that allow companies to track all communication, data, and business processes related to customer interactions. It’s important to establish a customer strategy before implementing CRM. The starting values of CRM software begin with:

• Acquisition of the right customers
• Crafting the right value proposition
• Instituting the best processes
• Motivating employees
• Learning to retain customers

Modern CSMs are providing such tools and pathways for agents to get answers faster and easier so that they can help establish these long-lasting relationships and drive the customer experience, as the recent study OTRS Spotlight: Customer Service shows. Implementation of a trusting customer portal allows free-flowing communication among the customer, agent, and leaders as well as serving as a central point for self-service options. The survey shows that when using self-service tools, leaders and agents were clear about their successes:

• 69% said customer satisfaction increased
• 49% said agents spend more time with each customer
• 56% enables customers can complete orders on their own
• 52% enables customers can send inquiries via the portal

In addition to CRM solutions used by account management and CX teams, modern support teams are also looking for technical solutions that help maintain customer relationships while providing top-notch service. For example, OTRS Customer Service Software is a preconfigured customer service solution that supports the goal of creating customer loyalty and driving revenue. This automated CS software offers multi-channel communication, service catalog information, request handling, secure customer data, and more.

About the Author

John Coggins is Director of Global Business Relationship Manager of OTRS Group.

OTRS Group is a service management software developer. Frequently used by ITSM, Corporate Security, or Customer Service teams.

For many businesses, the customer journey stops once the ink has dried on a contract or a purchase has been made. But market leaders know that in order to retain current clients and attract new ones, their journey with your business must be a continuous process.

Once a prospect turns into a customer – whether they’re contracted to your business or they make infrequent purchases – you need to retain them and ensure they become loyal to your brand. Key to achieving this is by delivering an outstanding experience.

Here, Janine Hunt, client partnership director at customer service expert Kura, discusses why a continuous good experience is so important and how you can deliver an experience that makes sure your customers aren’t poached by competitors.

The state of brand loyalty in the UK

According to Yotpo’s ‘The State of Brand Loyalty 2022’ report, one of the most important factors to UK consumers when choosing a brand to purchase from is shared values. A huge 86% of shoppers say they want to interact with businesses who share their beliefs, and this figure rises to 95.8% of Gen Zers – highlighting that brands need to adapt to this emerging consumer group.

Over a third of consumers who are loyal to brands will pay more for products even if competitors are offering cheaper alternatives, which highlights how important loyalty is when it comes to retention. The same report found that the feelings and expectations consumers associate with their preferred brands include trust, transparency, and good customer service.

What will loyal customers do for your business?

The Yotpo report found that, while consumers are concerned about data privacy, they’re more willing to share their personal data with brands they consider themselves loyal to, especially in exchange for discounts, personalised offers, or other “loyalty perks”.

The Tipping Point of Loyalty white paper from Upside found that loyal clients are 22 times more valuable to a business than average buyers. Its advice to businesses is to focus on converting sporadic customers to loyal shoppers instead of acquiring new prospects. As well as being more lucrative to businesses, it’s also more cost-effective – obtaining new customers costs five times more than retaining current ones.

Using customer experience to increase loyalty

It’s clear that loyal clients are important to your business and that a good customer experience is crucial to retention – a huge 96% of customers would leave a business if they received a bad experience. So how can you ensure a continuous journey that increases loyalty? Here are our top tips.

Stay in touch

Consumers that are loyal to a brand are more willing to share contact information, so use this to stay in touch and keep your brand front of mind. You could send shoppers who haven’t been active for a while exclusive discounts or loyalty perks, or simply communicate with contracted customers on a regular basis to ensure they’re happy with the service they’re receiving. Being proactive with contact means you can spot any potential issues that might make your clients look elsewhere before they leave.

Be contactable and prompt

As well as maintaining regular contact with your customers, it’s important that they can reach you when they need to. An omnichannel experience means clients can get in touch with you in a way that suits them best – limiting contact channels means you risk alienating those who are not digitally enabled or who may find phone conversations difficult. Over two-thirds of consumers want brands to offer a blend of physical and digital contact methods.

Response times are a bugbear of many customers, with a recent Money Mail audit finding people who call could be on hold for as long as 51 minutes with leading companies. Customer service outsourcing offers businesses who may struggle with capacity the ability to serve clients in a timely manner.

Offer loyalty benefits

Customers should be rewarded for loyalty. While many businesses focus on perks and discounts to attract new buyers, the priority should be loyal clients. 65.8% of consumers would like to sign up to brand loyalty programmes, so this offers you a great opportunity to offer them a personalised and memorable customer experience.

The customer journey has traditionally been considered finished at the point of purchase or sign-up with a business, but that’s not the case. Loyalty is significantly more profitable than new customer acquisition and it’s also cheaper to achieve. This level of loyalty can be attained by delivering continuously excellent customer service. If your clients feel connected to and valued by your business, they’re more likely to stay loyal and in return, spend more.

About the Author

Janine Hunt is client partnership director at customer service expert Kura,

There are numerous ways that customers engage with your business. Each one is a chance for you to nurture their interactions towards a sale, referred to as customer touchpoints.

Optimizing your customer touchpoints can lead to stronger brand loyalty, more revenue, and improved sales.

A customer touchpoint is any interaction a customer has with a business, from first learnings to repeat sales. The second a customer begins looking for services and products, there is an opportunity for them to interact with your brand.

Your customer journey is composed of a set of touchpoints. Your customers travel through such touchpoints that result in them buying. They then travel along more touchpoints as they’re nurtured for repeat purchases and, later on, brand loyalty.

Thanks to digital innovation, there are numerous options for engagement channels and customer touchpoints. Nonetheless, that also makes it more challenging. After all, you might forget a touchpoint. You might also be absent from a big potential platform.

If you ignore vital touchpoints, you might end up losing your customers, their loyalty, as well as possible income at the end of the day.

Why is Consumer Touch Points Important?

Did you know that fifty-four percent of customers like to purchase from businesses that offer diversity, equity, and inclusion in their workplaces and communities? That suggests that how you engage with customers affects your brand reputation and overall bottom line. That involves the quality of customer support.

Learning your customer touchpoints is essential for the following reasons:

• Touchpoints offer great data – You can measure the success of your touch points along the way, providing you insight into what your customers are seeking.

• Establish brand loyalty – Customers have numerous touch points between finding your business and becoming loyal customers. Good experiences at each touchpoint support brand loyalty over time.

• Producing more sales – You can nurture more customers toward a sale if you get your touch points right. Imagine this. Each touch point is a conversion opportunity.

Source

Customer Touch Points Examples

Remember that the customer journey looks diverse for each business. Thus, your customer touchpoints might not be the same as your competitors. Also, it comes down to how you advertise your business.

A single customer will never experience all of these touchpoints, but they’ll engage with your brand through many of those methods.

Here are the best examples of customer touch points that might apply to your business.

Pre-purchase stage

1. Blogs and articles

Publishing articles and blogs not just helps with search engine optimization, but you can also share the information on your social media platforms. Remember that well-written content establishes your brand as an authority and improves customer confidence in your business.

2. Online advertising

Customers are often exposed to ads on Google. On the other hand, they may also see banner ads or pop-up ads for your brand on other websites.

3. Social media

Big companies invest in SEO to make sure they rank well on search engines, especially for keywords that are relevant to their services or products. Each time a customer clicks a link to your Google page, your SEO is working.

4. Chat bots

Chat bots and self-service systems are becoming more typical. They are a traffic opportunity to deliver a positive experience for your customers. That’s why you need to ensure your self-service options are of the utmost quality.

5. Google My Business or local directory

With more and more customers looking for services and products nearby, especially on mobile search, it pays to make sure your Google My Business profile is properly set up. That and other industry directors provide you with an excellent opportunity to connect with a new audience.

Source

Purchase stage

6. Online payment processing

Do you encounter a lot of abandoned shopping carts in your online store? There may be an issue with your online payment processing. Ensure you provide your customers with enough payment options to make checkout straightforward, lowering the number of missed sales.

7. Phone contact

Is your business taking purchases or bookings over the phone? That is another customer touchpoint that can either drive folks mad or turn them into satisfied returning customers.

8. Product reviews

This can also be included in the pre-purchase section as customers look for your business using reviews. However, it can also be in the purchase state as people using your online store may still be considering two products as they are about to purchase.

It can also fall into the post-purchase stage, as you can motivate satisfied customers to leave a positive review. What we’re trying to say is that reviews are essential!

9. Point of sale

Whether it is in-store or online, the point of sale experience must be a positive one. Also, friendly customer service plays an important role here, but so does the technology you employ.

Post-purpose stage

10. Newsletter

Another great option is to get customers’ agreement to send them marketing emails—such as a weekly newsletter with valuable tips or insights. That way, aside from updating your customers on the industry trends and news, your can highlight your special or seasonal offers. How cool is that?

But it’s important that you verify email address. After all, real customers begin with real emails, and the use of email validation is the most efficient way to guarantee the collection of high-quality data.

11. Customer loyalty programs

Running a customer loyalty program offers you numerous touch points over an extended time. Whether it is marketing special offers or giving customers loyalty benefits, loyalty programs make it simple to reward your loyal brand fans.

12. Community management

Consider your business as an online community, especially on social media. Customers always love engaging with your brand organically. They might also share their experiences and tag you or might even ask for a resolution for a complaint.

Dealing with this online community with fast responses goes a long way in establishing brand loyalty.

13. Customer support

In the world of business, you will be fortunate if you never have post-sale concerns, returns, or complaints. It is part of running a business, and the way you deal with customer support could have an effect on whether customers go elsewhere or return in the future.

14. Billing

Getting an invoice is another crucial touchpoint for all your customers. It is crucial to make sure the process is as smooth as possible for your customers. You can achieve that by presenting them numerous payment methods.

15. Customer feedback

Keep in mind that successful companies utilize feedback as a means of improving their services and providing what customers want.

Source

Conclusion

Customer touchpoints influence your bottom line. It is vital that you put a lot of thought into your touchpoint strategy. Pleasing your existing and potential customers throughout the entire customer journey can have a positive effect on your bottom line and revenue.

Now that you have a good overview of how customer touchpoints can possibly impact your bottom line, you can now proceed with designing and optimizing your customer journey map.

Eventually, your customer experience strategy will be a well-oiled machine that continuously pulls in sustainable revenue for your online business.

By clearly knowing all your customer touchpoints, you can also work on optimizing each of them and boost your chances of a sale.

How to add meaning to your CJM by using visual materials, colors, and even emojis.

Who wouldn’t want to get into other people’s minds once in a while? Especially if those other people are customers and you are a seller or service provider. Since it’s not OK to grab your customer by the sleeve and demand them to tell all, we are lucky to have a methodology called customer journey mapping.

In essence, customer journey maps (CJMs) are made to visualize the customer’s path from initial thought all the way to action and make this visualization clear and understandable.

Unfortunately, it’s not always the case. Sometimes the CJMs are presented as a dry and boring spreadsheet full of words that are supposed to paint the picture. Instead of just showing the actual picture.

Source: Shopify

Our brain is just not trained to process text fast, we need time. Pictures, on the other hand, are highly comprehensible. According to John Medina’s Rule #10 from his bestseller Brain Rules, information is better absorbed when presented visually.

So, what are the tricks of transforming data into a pleasant and easy-to-grasp presentation? How can one make his CJM research colorful, clear, and convincing?

Paint the picture

By showing some creativity while visualizing a customer journey stage, you can improve CJM quality. Instead of writing a detailed description with dozens of words to read, just add a picture to the block of text. A visual component will accentuate the meaning instead of spreading it all over those three sentences you need to describe the action. It will clear out the air.

Source: edraw

Think of it this way: your essay on how you spent your vacation is not nearly as engaging as a picture of you in a hammock holding a fruity drink.

“The guy walks into a bar and asks for a drink” is better left to opening a bad joke. You can just add a picture of a guy at the bar. Depending on the specifics of the actual business, it can be a real-life picture of the shop, or a screenshot of an online store, or even a stick figure. Anything will be more alive than a scrupulous description.

You can create a whole storyboard section with actual customer actions to show a complete sequence of events. This way you won’t need to waste your space by filling it with text: pictures are self-explanatory.

There are very few tiny formats more engaging than comics. So why not put your essential data into a plain and consistent visual representation of real-life situations?

Source: UXPressia

Make whoever sees your CJM feel as if they were present at every stage of your customer’s journey.

Show some emotion

The reason we are so persistent in using emojis is simple: they express our feelings better than our own words.

Make a persona come to life in your CJM by showing their emotions throughout the journey. Customer experience is directly based on the emotional part of it. Putting an emoji instead of describing the customer’s attitude is a powerful tool: it basically gets us into empathy mode and allows us to take every interaction more personally.

Exactly the result we hope to achieve by building a CJM in the first place.

Source: Technology Meets Culture

Our most basic cultural code fills us with joy when we see a smile. And that’s how you can put “emotional” back into the “emotional journey”.

Picture channels and process

Don’t forget to visualize your persona’s channels and processes. Showing the type of the process is necessary to shine out the customer’s path through separate interactions.

• For the Linear process. Is it as direct as you were hoping it to be?
• For the Non-linear. Does it allow the customer to browse and stroll around freely?
• And for the Cyclical process. Is the repetitive part also time-consuming?

Source: UXPressia

Simple lines and circles offer a good representation of the most complex ideas, so why not add some basic geometry to your CJM.

This might show any unnecessary detours and repetitive actions your customers have to take every time they come to you.

Don’t hesitate to use visuals in describing the channels. It will work even better when there are many of those: repetitive words like “phone” and “Instagram” are overloading your map without much use.

Source: Ephlux

Present the people

The ultimate way to create an engaging map is to make it as realistic as possible. By adding interactions of your persona with others, you can give a whole new dimension to your CJM. After all, in real life customers are interacting not with an abstract business but with people in and around the actual business. And those interactions may play a crucial part in their journey: we can be easily bummed out by a chatty hairdresser or pleased by a standard greeting. And this variable is worthy of presenting.

Source: GSA

In general, life-like interactions are proven to be very engaging and relatable. Just ask anyone who’s still watching the Days of Our Lives.

Hit the charts

As mentioned before, geometry is a great aid to putting things in order. By triggering our ability to think in abstracts, a simple chart makes all the difference while presenting numbers.

Source: Usability Geek

The human brain has an intuitive understanding of sizes, shapes, and colors which allows you to put complex numbers in plain and logical packages. Arrows climbing and descending, bigger parts of a circular “pie” and neighboring columns – those symbolic images need no translation and instantly add transparency to numbers in your CJM.

Add a splash of color

The shapes are followed by the colors: another conspicuous way to tell things apart at first glance. Green light – red light. By color-coding your CJM you emphasize the good, the bad, the dangerous, and the rewarding.

Nothing says “we have a serious problem” better than the fiery red customer journey layout. It calls for action and demands to take measures that would relieve the pressure to the peaceful green level.

Source: Miro

Yellow can be used for those sections needing attention, as this color is a commonly known warning.

Keep it together

When presenting your CJM, it’s essential to make it informative and catchy, simple yet full of detail – in other words, to keep the balance. Not too flashy, not too dry. Just right.

By using all the means of expression mentioned, you can create a crucial piece of business analytics in a way it will be “speaking” to your audience.

Hopefully, it will be full of green color, growth charts, and smiley faces.

About the Author

Tanya Levdikova is the Head of Content @ UXPressia. When she is not working on content-related stuff for UXPressia users and blog readers, she’s probably petting her cat, baking cheesecakes, rewatching Doctor Who, or walking somewhere outdoors with loud music in her earbuds.

A customer journey map is a visual story explaining the process they go through when engaging with your brand. It begins with their awareness of your brand and ends with potential loyalty and even advocacy.

This kind of mapping is necessary to create seamless customer service for consumers. It’s also a means of gaining insights into what your current customers experience as they interact with your brand. If you’re looking to design your own map, there are a few key points you can make use of to get you going.

Here’s how you can get started on your customer journey mapping:

Gather All the Relevant Departments

The first step to get you started on mapping out your customer journey is to bring your team together. This involves the heads of departments in sales, marketing, customer service and web design. Each team should be relevant in promoting the customers’ relationship to your brand or organization.

It’s important to include the correct group of employees for your journey mapping to plan how customers can interact with your brand during each phase of their buying. These are the stages of customer awareness and exposure to purchasing and eventually loyalty. This collaboration of teams will help you create consistency within every service segment of the map.

Create a Customer Persona

Once you have your team assembled, you can focus on creating a customer persona. This is to gain a better understanding of your consumers and how they’re likely to approach your brand or service. The persona is meant to represent the customer’s experience and behavior as they engage with your business so you can improve it.

Keep in mind that you should create a customer persona for each stage of their purchasing. This is because your customers are likely to have different goals and functions which influence their decisions. For instance, potential buyers at the researching stage might just be trying to find out more about your products or services. Customers at the purchasing stage could be comparing different payment methods or plans to choose the best option for themselves.

Segment Customer Personas Into Touchpoints

At this point, you can start sorting your customer personas into touchpoints, which will eventually become part of your journey mapping. The main goal here is to start planning for the different times your consumers will be using your services as they move along through each buying phase.

The touchpoints should include what customers can expect before, during, and after they buy from you. You can segment the personas into stages such as:

• First Stage – awareness of your brand, which includes advertising and content
• Second Stage – researching, which includes online searches, browsing your websites, and contacting customer support for queries
• Third Stage – consideration such as when customers compare prices for choice reduction
• Fourth Stage – purchasing of your product through their preferred payment options
• Fifth Stage – feedback that can include surveys and reviews of their experience

This segmentation should give you a clearer overview of how your operations influence your customers into buying.

Compile Your Existing Data

Now, it’s time to get started on your customer journey map by using your existing data and filling it into the above touchpoints. You can group your data according to each segment such as the marketing materials that you have for the first stage. These can be online adverts, print web, and radio promotions that you currently use for example.

As you compile your data to fit into each segment, it’s essential that each department assess its current performance and customer perception. This is vital in finding the areas that need improving to better satisfy customers and lead to higher conversions. As such, if your data shows that many consumers stop at any point in their buying journey, there could be factors hindering their decision. In this case, you’ll need to identify these hesitations known as ‘pain points’ to make the buying journey easier.

Conclusion

After you’ve completed the above steps, you and your team can then start drawing up a more detailed journey map. If you’re a new business startup without previous customer experiences to draw from, you can use the map to plan every stage.

Be aware that your map should be flexible to changes you may want to implement later. This is because customer relationships and experiences can change from day to day and may need you to make adjustments. With all these elements combined, you can manage and anticipate your consumers’ movements as they participate with your brand. As your team makes refinements along the way, it can lead to more sales and brand loyalty over time.

About the Author

Cynthia J. Graves is a digital marketer and part-time freelance writer from Cumberland, Maryland. She’s passionate about digital technology and spends most of her time reading articles about the latest trends in social media. She aspires to start her own online marketing firm one day.

Too many organisations underestimate the power of voice and yet it continues to be the building block of an effective omnichannel customer engagement strategy.  Kris McKenzie at Calabrio suggests the secret to success lies in blending voice, and its unfiltered insights, with your CRM to build better customer journeys. 

In Calabrio’s recent blog “Harnessing CCaaS and CRM solutions: what’s the missing link?”, we discovered how data is the beating heart of a synchronised agent and user experience, empowering frontline staff to deliver better customer experiences.  We then explored the importance of capturing all kinds of information from inside and outside the contact centre – to create a “single pane of glass” where complete customer journeys are reflected, from the channels used, to previous purchases and past conversations.

Voice is the common denominator

If today’s news articles and social media are to be believed, achieving this “single pane of glass” in the new era of Customer Experience Intelligence (CXI) depends on a successful digital transformation that embraces the latest ‘must-haves’ such as Artificial Intelligence (AI).  However, organisations should not forget the role of voice calls to complete CXI data and to truly understand customer touchpoints. This begins by integrating voice with customer centric platforms such as customer relationship management (CRM).   

3 reasons why voice matters for holistic customer journey mapping 

• The trinity of integrated players for customer experience – modern cloud contact centres have mixed infrastructures including Contact Centre-as-a-Service (CCaaS) technology and typically a CRM product, however, both lack the capabilities necessary to fully map customer journeys. CRM specialists, while able to support modern omnichannel interactions, require access to voice and contact centre know-how to release the valuable intelligence that emanates from millions of customer calls, emails, texts, Tweets and Chat conversations happening in customer service interactions. 

Combined CCaaS and CRM solutions are not able to deliver omnichannel customer service infrastructure as well as entirely understand the customer at each and every touchpoint.  This is especially true at enterprise-level scale or complexity, however, there is a link missing to harness the full customer journey.

The perfect combination for customer experience (CX) is the best there is, and the trinity comes in the form of cloud-based contact centre (CCaaS) and customer relationship management (CRM) with integrated workforce engagement management (WEM) tools and analytics connecting the two.  Solutions like Calabrio ONE fit neatly between CCaaS and CRM solutions for workforce planning, workforce engagement and customer journey analytics, including all important voice calls.   

• Give digital touchpoints the right and real context – there are a myriad of solutions that claim to capture complete customer journeys.  In reality, the majority centre around the digital aspects of customer journeys whether that’s on a website, chat, social media or via an app and for most, the missing link is voice. Take the example of a customer who wants to order a gift for their mother’s birthday.  After adding the chosen item to their online basket, they realise they need more details about sizing or next-day delivery that they can’t find on the website so they use their mobile device to call the contact centre before checking out.  The problem with the majority of solutions is they are likely to portray a linear digital customer journey, thereby totally missing the vital voice connection when the customer called the contact centre – the critical make-or-break factor in the deal! Integrating voice with your CRM system makes it possible to connect every aspect of a customer’s journey with the brand, providing a complete view of all customer touchpoints, whatever the channel.   

• Aim high, be a Connected Enterprise – building and mapping better customer journeys by tightly integrating voice with CRM benefits not just customer service teams but an entire organisation. Many businesses spend valuable time and resources searching for answers that are right in front of them. The contact centre is at the heart of building the customer experience and understanding it. Connected enterprises need to look at how they can put the contact centre, and thus the unfiltered voice of the customer (VoC), as their central hub of intelligence about variables and processes related to CX.

The point of nirvana here comes with truly dynamic, near-real-time AI-based Business Intelligence systems that help all functions be better, from enabling marketing to understand campaign success and brand presence to finance understanding billing issues, refunds and credits, based on what all customers and agents are saying, as well as what they’re doing. Modern enterprises can use out-of-the-box, function-specific dashboards, such as those in Calabrio Enterprise CXI, designed to amplify speech analytics data captured in the contact centre to provide actionable insights to keep the entire organisation one step ahead.

While the bid to be omnichannel may leave many focused on the digital footprint of customers, it’s time to elevate voice to the place it deserves, firmly at the front-end of contact centre processes and the centre of CX.  For more ideas and inspiration on how to build better customer journeys or to learn about Connected Enterprises, visit www.calabrio.com

About the Author

Kris McKenzie is Senior Vice President International at Calabrio 

Calabrio is the customer experience intelligence company that empowers organisations to enrich human interactions. The scalability of our cloud platform allows for quick deployment of remote work models—and it gives our customers precise control over both operating costs and customer satisfaction levels. Our AI-driven analytics tools make it easy for contact centres to uncover customer sentiment and share compelling insights with other parts of the organisation. Customers choose Calabrio because we understand their needs and provide a best-in-class experience, from implementation to ongoing support. Find more at calabrio.com and follow @Calabrio on Twitter.

With customer journey mapping in place, brands can detect gaps in the service or product quality, see the opportunities for improvement, and establish tailored customer experiences.

Why use customer journey mapping?

As consumer behavior evolves rapidly, businesses need to get up to speed to meet customers’ expectations, earn their loyalty, and stay ahead of the market. Here, customer journey mapping can come in handy. This methodology enables companies to explore their business from the buyer’s perspective, identify and fix blind spots and flaws in their customer experience, product, or service, and come up with a strategy for improvement. However, to drive more insights, you should know how to use the technique to your advantage.

In this article, you will find tips and tricks on creating an effective customer journey map.

1. Opt for ready-made templates

If you are new to the technique and not sure where to start, ready-to-use customer journey map templates can be a great asset. Find a template that fits your industry, such as finance, retail, transportation, digital services, etc. Having it in front of you will allow you to better understand an average persona and their journey. Instead of starting from scratch, you can tweak the template to visualize your persona’s journey with your business, determine possible flaws you could never think about, and seize growth opportunities.

2. Start with buyer personas

Customers are unique in their backgrounds, views, tastes, and expectations. Before building a map, you have to pull together all these distinctions in a single buyer persona. You will therefore ensure your service or product is tailored to a specific persona to easily predict customer behavior and align your business strategy accordingly.

3. Make a map simple yet informative

Keep in mind that a customer journey map is to alleviate the understanding of your target audience, not to make it even more complex to grasp. Given all the data at your hand, you can be tempted to include every minor point in your map. However, this may be confusing, as you can get wrapped up in the details and won’t be able to gain valuable insights. On the other hand, if you go too high-level, it will be impossible to take specific actions based on the map.

4. List down the core touchpoints

Try to map every stage where your customer can potentially engage with your business and document all touchpoints. The touchpoints may include a website, an ad campaign, a social media account, a product demo, e-mail, etc. In addition, it is important to know how customers feel when coming into contact with your business, whether they are satisfied, ready to buy from you, or recommend your brand. When visualizing the exact way a persona interacts with your business, it is easier to see some specific points to improve. As a result, you will identify actionable items to tailor your product or service up to consumers’ needs, as well as achieve a better customer or user experience.

5. Look out for Moments of Truth

Moments of Truth (MoT) are touchpoints that occur between your business and a customer, where the latter forms his/her opinion about your brand. This experience can be both positive and negative and make a customer either establish or break further relationships with your company. Why is it so important to include MoTs on the map? For example, you are pitching your product to a customer. However, the presentation won’t load due to some technical bugs. This is a negative touchpoint. In order not to lose customer’s trust, you have to come up with some positive experience instead. This way, when you simulate customer expectations and certain outcomes, it is easier for you to understand the effort and resources needed.

6. Add visualization

A customer journey map is a convenient way to deliver new ideas and insights. Let your design team create pictures for each stage of the map so that it can clearly demonstrate the core point. Moreover, screenshots, storyboards, graphs, videos, and infographics make your journey map more appealing and easy to comprehend.

7. Capture customer emotions

Many organizations tend to focus on the service quality, internal processes, interaction touchpoints as core aspects that form an unparalleled customer experience. However, you should not ignore the fact that consumer emotions are equally vital, as they drive decision-making after all. Highlight the emotional state of your buyer personas during their journey to pinpoint the most painful and rewarding experiences.

8. Derive valuable data to take actions

It does not suffice to simply build a journey map. A well-considered map can shed light on some flaws in your service or product that affect customer experience. With this information at hand, you can draw findings on the gaps to fix, as well as the necessary tools and resources needed.

9. Engage your employees and distribute tasks

Now, when you are aware of specific improvements to be done at a particular stage, you can easily allocate tasks among your teams. This will alleviate the process of implementing changes, making it faster, more transparent, and easier to track. Also, try to involve your employees across different departments. Following such a brainstorming session, you will drive even more insights from different angles.

10. Take your time

Now, when you have a better view of what your perfect journey map should be, you might be eager to immediately start reworking it all at once. However, you should remember that prioritizing your efforts is key. Try to rank improvements from the top-down, add KPIs, and engage dedicated employees to do the job.

Wrapping up

Researching, identifying, and addressing consumer needs are the core objectives of every business. As customers’ behaviour and expectations change, so as your business processes, you should adjust your services and offerings accordingly. This way, a customer journey map is not a one-time deliverable, rather a constantly evolving asset. Make improvements and updates, as well as add actionable insights all the way long. With brand-new findings in place, you will create a one-stop hub to work collaboratively on taking customer experience to the next level.

About the Author

Iryna Kandrashova is a head of marketing at UXPressia, a user experience platform that allows you to сreate, export, and share customer journey maps, personas, and impact maps online. Iryna is keen on traveling (there are still some opportunities even now!), prefers an active lifestyle and amateurish sport. You can get in touch with her on LinkedIn.

Building a loyal customer base is essential to growing and maintaining a successful business. Loyal customers will always choose your brand over any others.

They will do this based on their experience of your products, customer service and the unique qualities that set your business apart.

The Buyer Journey

The route a prospective buyer takes from addressing a problem to finding the solution is known as the buyer journey. It can be broken down into three stages:

Awareness:

When a potential customer recognizes a problem they want resolved it is known as the Awareness stage.

You should reflect on the sort of questions they will be asking, and why your business can provide the answers.

It is also valuable to remember that the potential buyer may not have clearly defined needs. Good customer service will respond to this and help clarify and inform.

Consideration:

During this stage the potential buyer has defined their problem and is committed to finding a solution to it. They will want to know the possible answers to their issue and consider the best opportunity.

It is likely that they have discovered your brand as the best candidate for delivering a solution to their issue.

Decision:

At the decision stage the potential buyer has decided on a solution. At this point you should aim to make the final part of the process seamless and assured.

This is another stage where user experience is vital. This is just as true in a physical store as it is online.

For example, a customer service vendor with relevant retail information and sales technology at their fingertips can deliver a positive end result for both customer and business.

Generating Brand Loyalty

At the culmination of the buyer journey the aim should be to retain the customer’s loyalty.

Studies have shown that loyal customers are more likely to spend more and visit more regularly. Finding new customers is also important for business, but it will cost more in terms of marketing for the projected returns.

Looking after your customers is essential. It is the most cost-effective way of ensuring a good profitability and return on investment.

Streamlining the buyer journey

Making the entire buying process as convenient as possible is crucial in building loyalty. By producing an effective path through the various stages, it will be more likely that a customer will return.

It should be noted that the buyer journey does not always adhere to a traditional linear progression.

The buyer might be applying various methods to the different stages of their journey.  This makes it vital to be flexible and able to respond to all of their enquiries.

Key to making the process more efficient is the utilization of methods to streamline the buyer journey.

Here are some tips on how to do this:

• Consider using prepared scripts to improve communication with the customer at the various stages of their journey. This will ensure that they are properly informed and confident in the process.

• All of the information that your business holds about a customer can be integrated into a CRM system, making it quicker to respond to their inquiries.

• By knowing exactly where a potential buyer is in their journey, you can offer them the most relevant information they need to make a decision. Combining your sales and marketing teams will bring about a more effective experience for everyone involved.

A proactive business always puts the buyer journey at the heart of their operations. By streamlining the route that customers take to finding the best solution to their enquiries, you will develop a profitable business relationship.

So much of marketing now centres on ‘experience’, how do we provide that for our customers, how do we encourage our buyers to invest in the story of our product and how do we encourage them to share that experience, and by extension our product, on their social channels?

One tool both sales and marketing teams will come back to time and time again is the customer journey, a great way to visualise and understand the motivations of a potential client. The customer journey acts like a story, telling how they behave while they visit your shop, venue, event or website, and crucially: why. By understanding the journey, you can begin to improve it, increasing the likelihood of repeat business, positive opinion and advocacy.

With recent events swirling around us and causing large events, public gathering and physical shops to shut down or postpone operations for the foreseeable future, how do we use these tools and new technologies to keep providing customers with great experiences when we can’t gather in groups?

Firstly, let’s take a closer look at the customer journey.

What is the customer journey?

When you record the customer journey, you are endeavouring to map out different behavioural scenarios using data you already have, collected from your own business.

The resulting map is an easy to use marketing tool that anyone can create and can be invaluable to your organisation’s future strategy and planning.

This map provides two benefits:

• It allows decision-makers to focus on customers
• It helps make each step of the buying experience easier for potential leads

Organisations will typically seek to document their existing customers journey so that they can focus on two things:

• Improving the customers’ experience with the organisation, with the aim of increased customer loyalty
• Improving the organisation’s delivery of that experience, in order to streamline costs or operations.

Map out a customer journey & use this to better inform your marketing

Arguably the most important element of creating a compelling and therefore genuinely useful customer journey map, is to view the process from the customer’s perspective.

You will first need to collect two types of research to accomplish this:

Analytical Research: Using your website’s data, typically from Google analytics, will tell you exactly where the customers are active, how much time they spend on your site, plus when and where they leave.

Anecdotal Research: Social media is useful for gauging how customers feel or think, we call this brand sentiment. When someone is satisfied or upset about their experience with a company, they often feel compelled to use social channels as a mouthpiece. Proactive listening and asking customers to fill out surveys about their experience can also help you collect anecdotal research.

Use this data to then map out where each ‘touchpoint’ is for your particular client, or targeted client and adjust the site if necessary, looking for weaknesses in the path such as a lack of calls to action, poor on-page content or a badly functioning order or payment system.

This data will also show you hot spots of interest, or trends that are emerging. In both cases the findings can then fuel marketing strategies that directly respond to customer sentiment.

A notable shift has been the move from consumers blindly acquiring items to consciously choosing investment in memories, enrichment activities or experiences.

A recent Forbes article cited that 74% of Americans would prioritise experiences over products, and the stats don’t stop there.

Researchers and Economists have often grouped experiences in with services, but experiences are a distinctly different offering, as removed from services, as services are from goods.

Experiences have emerged as the next step in what we call the progression of economic value, then staging of experiences, is the next step to make these experiences virtual and therefore global in nature?

(image source)

Ownership of experience and social media involvement

How do these consumers then go about documenting these experiences? Via social media is the loud and resounding response.

59% of those surveyed would opt to take a photograph of an experience, meaning platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok are perfectly placed to cater to this visually motivated demographic seeking to share their memories.

(image source)

But is that enough in today’s complex and ever-changing socio-economic climate? Shops, restaurants and leisure facilities are all shutting all over the globe, so where can people gather to engage in experiential marketing events?

The next frontier must be virtual. The movement has already started at a grass roots level with individuals setting up ‘pubs’ to engage with friends all over the world in lockdown situations. Whether part of a brand activation team or an experiential marketing agency, event professionals have been moving towards more VR, AR and social platform based immersive experience campaigns in recent years. But now it’s imperative to stay relevant as people stay in.

Virtual experiential marketing

One particularly good example of moving the real world into the virtual realm is the Ikea Place campaign. The VR app allows users to place virtual Ikea furniture into their own homes to see how furniture would look once assembled. The new Ikea Place app claims to be 98% accurate in scale, rendering 3D images to react to light and shade, giving consumers a much more realistic portrayal.

Samsung instructed a marketing agency to create a series of interactive interconnected Instagram Stories that took you, the consumer, on a Black Mirror Bandersnatch-style adventure. Your mission is to safely carry the new Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ 5G to its destination. What follows, consists of a series of decisions you will have to make to pick the right path, it took 20 individual Instagram accounts and 50 Stories to make this immersive adventure for Samsung.

In recent days we have seen a rise in free virtual tours of some of the world’s largest art galleries, museums, zoos and national parks.

The world is a strange landscape for us right now as social beings and these institutions offering free entertainment and education will not be forgotten when the dust settles, and we return to the streets. These investments in brand reputation will pay dividends.

Now is the time for brands, businesses and organisations to look at what they can achieve, provide and do, to create an online, virtual version of themselves.

Many organizations are using customer journey mapping to understand and improve the experience of their customers. But it can be confusing. Let’s clear up the confusion and see how you can add clarity and power in the process.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

Customer Journey Maps are a visual representation of a customer’s relationship with your people, products, services and brand over time. Journey maps may be created for various customer segments. They can be for internal and external customers. They may include various product lines, service offerings, contact and distribution channels.

A good customer journey map should be easily understood and applied to generate customer experience improvements. However, since each map may represent a complex set of players, interactions, relationships, processes, timelines, and emotions, maps too often become vague or confusing with language and visuals that limit their effectiveness as a communication and improvement tool.

To help you maximize the value and effectiveness customer journey maps, here is a clear structure you can apply to customer journey mapping.

1. The Customer Life Cycle

A natural collection of Customer Journeys over the life of the customer relationship. Other common terms include: cradle-to-grave relationship, end-to-end relationship, customer for life experience, and lifetime customer connection.

2. The Customer Journey

A series of unique paths a customer takes to interact with your company, brand, products, and services over time and across channels. In UP! Your Service terms, this is a series of Service Transactions, also commonly called end-to-end experiences.

For example, an organization may define these common Customer Journeys in a typical Customer Life Cycle:

LEARN > TRY > BUY > INSTALL > USE > SUPPORT > UPGRADE

3. The Service Transaction

These are unique and specific transactions experienced by a customer within a journey to obtain the value that they seek. Other common terms include service events, service episodes, and customer interactions. Confusingly, these complete transactions are sometimes called touchpoints. (See #4 below.)

4. The Perception Points

These are individual points within a Service Transaction, or between Service Transactions, where a customer notices something, or experiences something, and forms an opinion about your service. Perception Points are not the process you follow, it is your customer’s experience of your process that matters. Other common terms: moments of truth, moments of magic, moments of misery, pleasure points, and pain points.

5. The Process Steps

These are the consistent, documented sequence of actions and other steps taken by service providers to complete a Service Transaction or transition the customer between Service Transactions. Other common terms include: process map, process flowchart, and checklists.

What are the common problems with weak customer journey maps?

How you define the language you use in customer journey mapping impacts your ability to create common understanding, take collective action, and create new value. Lack of clarity and agreement on terms will lead to these unnecessary problems:

Lack of clarity downstream

A web search for “customer journey mapping” returns an enormous collection of terms and phrases. However, many are used interchangeably, the same word may describe different levels of detail, and the result is predictable confusion.

The words you choose is less important than making and promoting a clear choice, defining a simple hierarchy with clear distinctions at every level.

Ineffective measurement of service

Being clear about what you are doing at each stage of a journey map helps you choose the right measurements for that level of the map. You can measure many things about service and customer experience, but these measurements may not be well connected to each stage of your customer’s overall journey.

A common example is when customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores or Net Promoter Scores (NPS) scores are captured at the Service Transaction level. A customer may rate you highly within a specific transaction, but consider you a problematic provider in another transaction, or in the transition between transactions. Measures at the level of the Customer Lifecycle or Customer Journey are required.

Unfocused generation of new ideas

You may want to involve your employees and partners in generating new service improvement ideas. But an unfocused request for “ideas to help us make service better” will produce a list of equally unfocused ideas.

A better approach is to solicit ideas with clear focus on key areas at each stage of the customer mapping process, on specific outcomes you wish to achieve, and for specific customer segments taking the journey.

An effective Customer Journey Map, with each level and each term clearly understood, allows you to isolate key points of joy to be expanded or enhanced, and key points of frustration to be eliminated or significantly improved.

Ultimately, Perception Points is the level where opportunities for service improvement will be implemented. But without a clear hierarchy of terms and understanding, your team may not focus on these points, may miss seeing what causes problems at these points, and may fail to generate good ideas to improve service at these points.

Gradual decline of engagement and service culture

Customer Journey Maps are often used to build a more customer-centric culture. But poorly defined maps create more confusion and questions than insight and answers. When struggling with vague or confusing maps, you may hear reactions that point to barriers deeply embedded in existing systems, practices, process, policies, traditions, and leadership behaviors. Common reactions from colleagues include; “We don’t really understand the issue…”, “We can’t do this because…”, and “They won’t let us do that…”

However, by looking holistically and working with well-defined Customer Journey Maps, you can bring everyone to a shared view on what needs to be improved, and what barriers are standing in the way. Overcoming “we can’t” becomes easier when everyone can see the problems.

A culture of service excellence accelerates when everyone can work solving these problems together.

About the Author

Jeff ​Eilertsen writes for Ron Kaufman’s “UP Your Service!” website. Ron Kaufman believes service to others is the essence of humanity and is author of the New York Times bestseller Uplifting Service and 14 other books on service, business, and inspiration, with sales exceeding 500,000 copies.