Customer Experience Management (CEM), Journey, Map (CJM), Strategy

Customer satisfaction definitely tops organizational priorities, but too often the concept fails to cross boardroom boundaries. Most companies fail to bridge the large divide between customer satisfaction in theory and actual implementation. Executives attribute this failure to the organizational inability to basically understand their customer expectations.

Product, process, and service design is thus based more on internal opinions rather than on insights of people who really matter…the customers. Consequently, customer brand value experience is seldom rendered.

Many organizations are turning to customer journey mapping to bring the true voice of customers into the organization, and close the gap between conceived vision and delivered reality. Customer Journey Mapping (CJM), simply put, is seeing your company from your customer’s viewpoint. Customer interactions across all levels of service are explored and analyzed throughout his/her lifecycle, to understand the impact on customer relationship. Customer journey maps, once created, offer an opportunity to gain insights into true customer perceptions and their expectations at every organizational level, at every touch point of the relationship journey.

Still, however effective the CJM concept, it needs to be supported by best practices  What follows are some ideas regarding CJM, to deliver powerful results for your company:

Determine existing organizational perception regarding your customers – Gather customer data from organizational hierarchies that are directly involved with customers. Gather their insights into customer expectations. Involve other stakeholders in the capacity of idea/opinion contributors on customer needs. This process helps understand the organization’s existing perspective of customer expectations. In addition, it also enables project leaders identify the crucial sources of customer data and encourages stakeholders’ participation at the outset itself. Document research results, share them across divisions, and build a basic prototype to map customer journey.

Research customer requirements – Explore every touch point (points of customer interactions with the company). Capture customer feedback, suggestions, needs, and other insights employing qualitative research strategies such as ethnography. Contextual observation helps discover areas of customer dissatisfaction and product/service enhancement. Use the advantage of social media to gain insights into your customer opinions and attitude.

Analyze customer requirement research results – Dissect and analyze the research findings to understand how customers interact, what they expect from every interaction, and if they feel the current interaction(s) was (were) positive and useful. Create a journey map to visually represent the customer experience with the company and expectations involved.

Echo customer voice across the organization – Share findings of customer journey maps across all levels of the company. This drives customer centricity throughout the organization. This is also crucial to rectify deficiencies at touch points that require cooperation of different business units (e.g., sales and shipping).

Turn customer expectations to reality – Act on customer insights through concrete measures. This requires the cooperation of all rungs including customer service executives and organizational leadership.

Customer journey maps not only enable you to convert your vision experience into reality but also redefine them. As such, customer journey mapping should not be a one-time process.