In our previous insights article, we covered the importance of enhancing the customer experience. Providing a seamless customer experience across all major touchpoints of the customer journey is essential for increased profitability, improved customer service, cost optimization and greater omnichannel engagement. To make this possible, marketers have started incorporating customer journey maps in their marketing strategy. In this insight article we will speak about customer journey mapping which lies at the core of holistic enterprise-wide digital transformation. This new-gen technology can assist marketers identify business objectives as well as necessary benchmarks and come up with a roadmap that is aligned to the organizational requirements.

What is customer journey mapping?

Now, the question arises, what is customer journey mapping? Customer journey maps are nothing but visual representations of the sum total of interactions that your customers have with your brand. Customer journey mapping helps marketers analyze the first interaction that the customer had with the company as well as the possibility of building long-term relationships based on subsequent interactions. Creating a visual representation of the end-to-end customer journey is useful in identifying and analysing any gaps in the service being provided to the customers. This, in turn, helps in providing a superior customer experience and drive positive business results.

As a marketer, it is important that you start using customer journey maps if you haven’t done so already! Customer journey mapping can improve the customer experience in the following ways:

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Identify Gaps

One of the primary benefits of customer journey mapping is that it helps in identifying service gaps, if any. Every brand has a unique marketing strategy consisting of innovative campaigns to attract leads into the marketing funnel. With customer journey mapping, marketers can analyze the marketing funnel to check which are the phases where customers seem to be dropping off from the funnel. While some drop-off is inevitable, an uncharacteristic spike in drop-offs can be a cause for concern. Why is it important to find any gaps in the marketing service being provided? By identifying these gaps, marketers can optimize their marketing campaigns to be more effective and in line with customer needs. This, in turn, helps in providing a superior customer experience and driving customer journey transformation.

Identify Touchpoints

Every customer is different and so are their needs and journeys. Providing a standardized service to all your customers will have a negative effect on revenue numbers. Different objectives and customer journeys result in unique touchpoints. With customer journey maps, marketers can identify the different touchpoints for different target customer groups. This is important as identifying the various customer touchpoints can shed light on probable pain points that customers might have across their journey. Based on such insights, marketers can remove these pain points before they can result in customers dropping off and switching to competitors. Further, these insights can also be used to enhance the customer journey to drive omnichannel engagement.

Remove Clutter

It goes without saying that all your marketing strategies will not generate the desired results. To hone your campaigns, it is important to establish what is and isn’t working. This is true for not only the marketing strategies but also all your marketing campaigns as well as your website. With customer journey mapping, companies can have an in-depth view of which parts of the marketing strategy are compelling customers to convert and which parts are making them drop off from the sales funnel. Based on this data, marketers need to take a call on whether to optimize or discontinue the low-performing marketing campaigns and strategies. Whatever be the action taken, the objective should be to reduce unnecessary expenditure and ensure that customers get the experience that they desire.

Personalization

Every marketer worth their salt knows that the age of standardisation is long gone! Staying ahead of customer expectations requires deep personalization. For this, marketers need to gather data and insights about customer behaviours and purchase patterns. With customer journey mapping, marketers can gather the necessary information at every stage and touchpoint of the digital customer journey. Once the data has been captured, the next step is to determine the level of personalization that can be provided to each customer. Based on the customer journey map, marketers can plan the personalization strategy in such a way that fulfils customer needs without being too personal and intrusive. By using customer journey mapping to personalize the various customer interactions, marketers can enhance the offerings and drive customer journey transformation.

Streamline teams

No matter what the activity is, the final goal is always providing a superior customer experience and exceeding customer expectations. To guarantee this, companies need to ensure that all its teams are consistently working towards building customer delight. While customer journey mapping may be a marketing activity, the actual customer journey will encompass teams beyond just the marketing team. For instance, a lead might enter your marketing funnel after coming across a marketing campaign, convert into a paying customer after talking to a salesperson and remain a loyal and long-term customer due to the seamless service provided by the post-sales customer service team. Hence, in this case, the customer interacts with the marketing team, sales team and customer service team throughout their customer journey. With customer journey mapping, marketers can ensure a smooth and seamless transition between the different teams by identifying gaps and rectifying the same. This, in turn, helps in ensuring that customers receive a premium service across all departments and channels, driving omnichannel engagement.

The importance of customer journey mapping is quite evident by now. The holistic business growth of a brand is impossible without a dynamic and in-depth customer journey map. The bottom line is that customer journey maps can help marketers get up close and personal with their customers, understanding who they are, what they need and what would make them happy. This, in turn, assists in creating marketing strategies and campaigns which are aligned with the customer’s requirements. Staying in touch with the customer’s needs is essential for customer journey transformation. At the end of the day, the brand that knows its customers comes out on top.

At Talisma, we have years of experience in understanding the company’s strategic goals and aligning them with the market demands. Our customer journey solutions can help you in creating a dynamic customer journey map that will drive omnichannel engagement.