It’s not always easy to navigate through the customer success process. Customer success, like any other tricky-to-navigate sector, requires a map. A customer journey map can help with this. It’s a document (or set of documents) that outlines when various teams in your company should communicate with customers. Read further to know in detail about the best practices that you should follow for building an effective Customer Journey Map.
What is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map depicts the steps your consumers should follow to be successful with your products. It’s a terrific instrument for aligning your firm around your customers’ demands. And for assisting you in determining what you need to do to improve your customers’ experience through their journey.
From the point of purchase until renewal, it should be a visual depiction of all the encounters, interactions, and success milestones the consumer has with your brand and product. By defining the major milestones in a customer’s relationship with you, you may construct a customer journey map.
Suggested Read: The Ultimate Guide on Customer Journey Mapping
Benefits of a Customer Journey Map
Why do you need a Customer Journey Map? You are good to go with a success plan after all. Yes, but it is tough!
Customer success demands collaboration across a variety of individuals, teams, and divisions within your company. Even if you’re a small business, you’ll have multiple contact points where different personnel engage a client (or potential consumer) at different times.
Your employees will miss important touchpoints if they don’t know when they’re supposed to contact customers. The ideal contact window is sometimes quite small, and a customer journey map might help you hit that window.
- Encourage a customer-focused organizational culture.
- Get a better understanding of your customers.
- Increase the number of return customers
- Reduce customer churn.
- Increase the lifetime value of your customers.
- Improve the customer experience
- Increase the number of sales conversions
These are a few of the many advantages that a customer journey map can bring to the ‘customer success’ table.
Pro tip: Customer Journey in SaaS
7 Best Practices for an Effective Customer Journey Map
Look at the customer journey from the customer’s point of view rather than your firm.
It’s critical for firms working on a customer journey map to realize that the journey map begins before a consumer establishes a relationship with them. The map begins with the first impression of the brand and leads the client to success (renewal).
At the very least, you want to start persuading buyers at the category level. In other words, you’re concerned about the information people find about your category because it will have a direct impact on whether or not they choose your company.
Layout and give the details for transitions/handoffs
Identify the transitions between departments as you build your journey. When and who does what? This should be obvious. You’ll also need a strategy for how data will transit and be processed between handoffs.
Different teams and groups will most likely need to share data as they become more active in the customer life cycle. Which promotional materials were delivered to the lead will be of interest to the sales team. The implementation team requires access to data gathered by sales previously. Customer service may require implementation specifications.
Make sure you document the appropriate actions in any handoff once groups have been designated to each phase of the life cycle.
Cross-Functional Heads to work for customer’s success
A successful customer journey map implementation is the result of the efforts of many individuals. Even if it starts with the CEO, it must be energetically carried out by many functional heads. Each person in charge of customer service, sales, or marketing must be able to see the big picture and trust in the process that led to it.
The customer journey map will invariably reveal areas that require improvement across functional lines. That’s just the nature of the job. It’s important to construct functional boundaries to manage enterprises.
What are the Key ‘Moments of truth’?
Define success benchmarks along the way. Everyone should be aware of this. These milestones demonstrate that a consumer is progressing and succeeding with your product or service. These are what we refer to as “moments of truth.”
Customer journey mapping is the most effective technique for analyzing the touchpoints that the company has with its consumers. So, it’s crucial that you identify the key moments throughout the customer journey. For that to happen, monitor and revise your journey map. After that, look for possible triggers or chances that appear as consumer interactions. Consider their impact, as not all encounters are necessary. Determine who controls those moments of truth at each level of touch basing on that. From onboarding to renewals, these become the key ‘moments of value’ for your consumer if done correctly.
Real focus on customer’s pain points
Your customer success journey map is bound to fail if it does not consider its essential component- Customers. Starting internally now makes absolute sense from a workflow standpoint. It can assist stakeholders to focus on their customer contacts and arranging conversations with real customers.
You won’t understand these facts unless you’ve gone out and spoken with real customers. You want to learn where the pain is, where the uncertainty is, and where organizations are falling short of genuine customers as they describe their experiences. You’ll always have useful, actionable outcomes if you understand that.
Suggested template: Customer (User) Journey Template
Share the Customer Journey map with customers
Share the journey map with a few trustworthy customers to see if it’s accurate. Don’t be scared to be humble enough to receive their feedback; it will pay off in the end. In many circumstances, it’s better to go straight to your clients and ask them. Find out what success means to them and how your product fits into that concept.
You can work backward to determine the ideal way to proceed during the customer success journey once you know what you’re attempting to help your customer do.
Don’t forget to optimize your journey map
You may utilize your customer journey map to promote customer journey optimization at each stage once you’ve charted it. Several strategies can be used to identify ways to improve your client journey:
- Validate your customer journey map
- Analytical methods for tracking client behavior
- Use tools like surveys and interviews to get feedback from customers
- After you’ve made your tweaks, keep an eye on them to see if they’re making a difference.
Keep in mind that the customer journey map will change as your company and consumers grow. It should never be something you create a long time ago. Make sure you’re tracking your progress and optimizing your journey on a frequent basis.
Final thoughts
When planning out the customer journey map, the most essential thing to remember is to look at every step from your customers’ perspective and keep their priorities and goals in mind. Identifying changes to optimize and improve the customer experience is where you can start to provide more value to your consumers, assist them in reaching their goals with your solution, and keep them for the long run.
Best practices for a customer journey map can help you increase sales income by assisting you in improving customer retention and encouraging repeat business.
P.S. – The main image has been taken from pexels.com
