Customer journey maps are a visualization of the journey that your customers go through to understand and engage with your organization. They tell a story from when a prospective customer first heard about you, through first contact and into a (hopefully) long-term relationship.
Customer journey maps are a tool for your organization to measure customer attraction, retention and growth. Here are few metrics that you should pay attention to:
Reduce time of the activity or completely eliminate tasks that bring no value to your customer.
In many cases, what is preventing your customers from enjoying your product or service is a task they need to complete that takes too long or is just unnecessary. Customer journey maps will bring these touch points to light.
Once these trouble spots have been identified, think through better design solutions to reduce the time of the task or completely eliminate the step in the process all together with automation.
Increase tasks completion on tasks that are hard to do with better design
Worse than being irritated with a task that takes too long is not being able to complete a task at all. This can be a moment of truth where your customers walk away from your brand and find another.
It is mission critical to fix these areas right away. The best way to attack these problems is to ensure a complete understanding of your customers’ mental model. Talk to your customers while they are interacting with the trouble spots of your product and service. Based on what you learn, prototype a solution and test it with a small sample of your customers. You really want to ensure that you fix the problem and not create another problem or worse problem.
Increase loyalty and advocacy
Satisfaction is OK but that doesn’t mean that your customers are going to stay with your brand. You want your customers to be loyal to your brand – even better, advocating your brand. The best way to measure this is with Net Promoter Score (NPS).
I recommend having an NPS for every touch point in your customer journey that is tied to your organizations Key Performance Indicators (KPI).
It’s not enough to just make a customer journey map and hang it on the wall. Your customer journey map is a tool to measure the success of your business.
I will be discussing this and more on my talk, A Journey with Customer Journey Maps, at the AMA OC Marketing Tech Summit, September 15.