Making your customers happy begins with taking their point of view. During their interactions with your brand, there may be times when your service falls short of their expectations. To identify these moments, it’s essential to create a customer journey map. These maps allow brands to gain a visual understanding of the entire customer experience, anticipate problems that may arrive at each step, and ultimately find solutions proactively. Here are four specific reasons why your brand should create a customer journey map.
When you map out the customer experience, you can anticipate why customers might choose each channel and how they might feel at each touchpoint. For example, what might a customer who contacts you for service via social media expect from the interaction? What is your brand’s typical response time in this situation? You can use a map to anticipate the needs of customers at each step and consider all the possible outcomes when you interact with them. By consulting customer feedback and data, you can also apply information you have already learned about actual experiences.
Customer journey maps enable your brand to identify any potential gaps in service. When customers switch from one channel to another, what problems may arise? Will a customer’s data be available for the next agent who handles the case, or will the customer have to repeat information? These maps can be used to determine how seamlessly one can move across channels and different devices such as computers and smartphones. You may discover problems such as insufficient IVR menus, poor communication among agents, or a difficult checkout process.
Once you have identified any problems with your service, your company can work as a whole to improve them. Both customer service and sales teams can receive additional training and mentoring, and they may be invited to share their own feedback. It’s also important to define clear goals for the entire company as well as for each department. The better your employees understand what they should be working toward, the more successful everyone in the organization will be.
Ultimately, customer journey maps are excellent tools for driving brand success. By recognizing problems before they arise, you can avoid the cost of losing customers who might otherwise abandon your brand. At the same time, more effortless experiences will surely attract the attention of both new and current customers. As Aberdeen Group points out, the financial benefits of mapping are tremendous: an 18 times faster average sales cycle, 56% more revenue from cross-selling and upselling, and 3.5 times greater revenue from customer referrals.Any brand that claims to embrace a customer-centric attitude must take mapping seriously. By seeing your company through the eyes of your customers and striving to surpass their expectations with seamless experiences, you will achieve greater success in the long term. To deliver the very best customer experiences, learn about Vocalcom, a global leader in AI-powered contact center software solutions and premium omnichannel customer interaction platform.
