Placing Your Customers At The Front Of Your Business Design

Whether you’re a small-to-medium sized company (SMB) or a large enterprise, you need to understand your customers’ journey. Regular Customer Journey Mapping allows business owners to actively “course-correct” and address process inefficiencies. It also provides an opportunity to evaluate and address customer needs and preferences.

It’s important to take Customer Journey Mapping best practices into account, and there are classes available. Time spent understanding and implementing this process is definitely time well spent. However, try not to get bogged down in all the details.

BENEFITS OF CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPPING

• The Customer Journey Mapping process can uncover the “buying process” frustrations. Frustrated prospects may find alternative solutions. Mapping experts call these Moments of Truth (MOTs). Negative MOTs are bad for business. The sooner you uncover them, the sooner you can stop prospects and customers from falling out of the buying funnel.
• This exercise explores the various possible avenues to your products/services. Not every prospective customer will take the same journey. For example, customers who use a website chat feature to engage with your company may behave differently than those who pick up the phone. You’ll want to design your intake processes to accommodate contact variations and avoid sending a chat lead down the same sales processes as a phone lead. A prospect more comfortable with chat might dislike contact via phone. This user generally expects quicker resolution and full documentation of their interaction with your staff. Forcing subsequent phone conversations may negatively impact their intent to purchase.
• Understanding the variations in your prospects’ background, needs, and expectations help you better understand your customers. The Mapping process can help you create Buying Personas, another critical tool to understand and properly address your customer. Addressing particular Personas creates a better Customer Experience (CX), which establishes overall customer satisfaction.

o   What moments in the process are enjoyable to the customer, and how can you leverage those?

o   What moments cause friction or frustration and how can you reduce those?

o   Are there situations where where faster is not better, and vice versa?

• Journey Mapping can also help evaluate the automated and manual parts of your customer intake and overall buying process. Over-automation can negatively impact the CX, and you might finds reasons to reintroduce a “human factor”. For example, DirecTV’s streaming service is almost 100% automated. Customers have little opportunity to interact with service personnel, which has resulted in a very negative reputation. AT&T is heavily investing in Customer Journey Mapping (https://www.marketforce.com/tags/customer-journey-mapping) to address the issue.
• Customer Journey Mapping provides a clear understanding of your company’s MOTs, allows for a deeper understanding of your overall CX, and helps your staff build comprehensive and actionable Buying Personas. This process will help your business efficiently and effectively utilize precious resources and ultimately lay a foundation for a more profitable and successful company.

GUEST BLOG AUTHOR: RUTHANN SWAIN

Sales and Marketing Business Process professional with a focus on nurturing customer relationships and improving the interface between customers and employees. Social Media Specialist and Strategist. Communicating and Listening to customer's is my passion. Whether it be Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer or User Experience, they all put the customer first, which is where I like to make a difference.

Degree in Psychology from University of Santa Barbara, California, and MBA with a focus in Marketing from Bradford University, Bradford, England.

Career started in retail and progressed into the technology industry.

I enjoy being both creative and technical, creating a campaign or pulling together the analysis of that campaign both make me equally happy. Creating a process, implementing a tool, collaborating with customer's, pulling together an event, all these things bring me joy and bring value to a business.

Connect with Ruthann on LinkedIn.