The customer journey is something business owners must put real emphasis on. It is an integral part of the overall customer experience in any organization, and it’s important to optimize it as much as possible. In this article we’ll explain what the customer journey is, why it matters, and what to focus on when mapping the customer journey in your organization.
What is a customer journey?
The customer journey is the complete experience a customer has with an organization, covering every interaction across all of the business’s channels, devices and touchpoints. In other words, every interaction an existing or potential customer has with the business is part of the customer journey.
In the digital age, companies use a wide range of communication channels to engage with their customers. Too many channels can undermine the customer journey and lead to strategies that are inconsistent with one another. That’s why it’s important not to spread yourself too thin online, and to maintain digital assets in line with the organization’s resources.
The customer journey is a critical component of a company’s growth engine. In this article we’ll take a closer look at the customer journey and how to map it correctly within an organization.
“The customer is always right!” How many times have we heard business owners say that? Plenty. But do business owners actually treat their customers that way?
Usually, the answer is no.
When an organization or company truly means it and puts it into practice, it makes us, the consumers, feel special. We feel understood and respected. That feeling is a vital part of building the customer relationship – the outcome of an interaction that could have ended differently, and less favorably for our organization, had we not had the foresight to adopt the strategy in advance.
After a successful customer journey with a business, we recommend it to friends and family, and become satisfied, loyal customers over the long term.
From a business perspective, companies that treat their customers as special enjoy greater success and growth on every metric than companies that don’t. A great customer experience and journey let an organization grow organically through word-of-mouth referrals. The longer our business has been around, the more satisfied customers we’ll have to help grow our customer base.
A great customer experience starts with the organization properly learning about and building the customer journey for its customers.
A study by Econsultancy found that 50% of organizations do not understand or know their own customer journey. In other words, about half of all organizations are not interested in, or not even aware of, their customers’ overall experience. If we, as managers, don’t know our customer journey or customer experience, how can we improve it and increase the number of satisfied customers?
In this article we’ll cover the customer journey in detail: how to map it correctly, how to use customer journey mapping to cut costs, and how to increase revenue by creating a better customer experience.
How can you make sure the customer journey is a positive one?
The first step is mapping the customer journey.
Accurately learning and mapping the customer journey is a key milestone in creating a great customer experience.
Customer journey mapping is done in three main stages:
- Creating a customer journey map.
- Identifying the touchpoints between the consumer and the business.
- Analyzing the gaps between the current situation and the goals we’ve set ourselves.
Ideally, customer journey mapping should be carried out by an external company rather than by the business itself, since a self-assessment can never be truly objective.
For small businesses
If you decide to approach your customers directly, here are a few questions you can ask to carry out an initial review of your customer journey:
- What was your search process like?
- How did you find us [company name]?
- How important was the option of a 30-day free trial in your purchase decision?
- What made you choose us over [competitor name]?
Feedback from end consumers is essential for business development. Customer journey insights enable any organization to learn about its customers and improve accordingly.
Medium and large organizations
Unlike small businesses, large organizations cannot afford to map the customer journey on their own. When a business runs multichannel communication with its customers, the mapping process becomes far more complex. That’s why it’s important to work with an external, independent company to carry out the research, so that it can provide objective answers.
Surprisingly, on average only one in five businesses collects and examines data about its customer journey – which prevents the rest from improving and streamlining their overall customer experience.
A well-designed customer journey is essential for every business, and CI Meida Shivuki is Israel’s leading research company for customer experience research and customer journey mapping in organizations.
CI Market Research collects information using virtually all accepted techniques, allowing us to apply the right technique to each research need. WHAT? SO WHAT? NOW WHAT? – we know (after 24 years and hundreds of studies of every kind, across every market) that what our clients want is not a pile of data “dressed up” in a presentation. They want experience, answers, and recommendations for action. And that’s exactly what we love to do.
If you’d like more details and want to learn about the customer journey in your organization, contact us today.
