It's time to say goodbye to the "trial-and-error" approach and say hello to Customer Journey Mapping.
A couple of years ago, I was given the MOST important task - building the Customer Success team at the company. I was excited but nervous, very nervous.
As I was researching for the first steps, the term "Customer Journey Map" kept coming up as the very first step.
But I just brushed it off. You see, it seemed too complicated and I thought I didn't have time for it.
Boy, was that a huge mistake.
A Customer Journey Map is a visual representation of a customer's direct and indirect touchpoints with our company, including all of the steps required to complete a task (Micheaux & Bosio, 2018).
Each touchpoint is an experience and as such, it serves as a key moment that influences the future of the relationship.
If the sum of positive experiences outgrows the sum of negative experiences, then we're likely to have a committed and loyal customer on our side.
But if not, well, churn is inevitable.
The Customer Journey Map visualizes the entire journey - from Awareness to Renewal and Advocacy. It divides the journey into various stages and for each stage, it shows:
The goals of the customer,
The touch-points,
The actions required to complete the stage and move forward successfully.
With this information, not only can we understand the full customer experience, but we can also identify pain-points and challenges that might result in churn (Rosenbaum, Otalora & Ramirez, 2017).
We can then work with cross-functional team members to improve the service by employing tactics that either
Solve pain-points, or
Encourage the customer to take specific actions that decrease the Time to Value.
Great, where should I start? 🤔
Define the stages in the Customer Journey Map. My recommendation is to use an existing journey created by other teams and adapt it to CS. This way, you can make sure that the journey is clear for everyone else.
Walk in your customer's shoes. Create a fake account and go through all of the different stages in the journey. a. Keep track of all the emails you receive as a new customer. b. Write down anything that might not be clear or simple enough.
Analyze all of the emails sent to the Support team to understand what are the current pain-points and challenges.
Resources:
Micheaux, A. & Bosio, B. (2018). Customer Journey Mapping as a new way to teach data-
driven marketing as a service. Journal of Marketing Education, 41(2), pp. 127-140.
Rosenbaum, M. S., Otalora, M. L., & Ramirez, G. C. (2017). How to create a realistic customer
journey map. Business Horizons, 60(1), pp. 143-150.
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