In the 21st century, many businesses have been moving their operations online. While that comes with many advantages and disadvantages, one clear advantage is the more data-driven approach that businesses can take to better serve their customers. Among these is the customer journey map, which a key part of creating an overall customer success journey. Simply put, a customer journey map is a way to plan out the steps that a customer undergoes.
However, a modern customer success journey does not end during the customer onboarding stage. Rather, there are many stages throughout the customer lifecycle that a customer journey map needs to map out. For one, not all customers’ journeys are the same. Using a more ‘touch-based’ approach may make sense from a mapping perspective, but it’s not typically how customers actually interact with businesses. Instead, the customer success journey should be understood to be variable, and not all customers will have the same experience with your business.
As a result of this, you should make sure that your business uses the customer success journey to optimize for customer experience, not just for the ease of your business. For example, you may be able to identify through the customer success journey map common problems that come up, but there may be divergent customer experiences to this problem. If a customer reacts particularly negatively to a part of the customer journey, you’ll not only want to quickly fix the problem, but also add in something extra to show customer appreciation. If done correctly, this can make a customer feel as though you are personally invested in their journey with your business, and will give them all the more reason to stay. However, if these issues are ignored, then it is likely that you’ll have extensive customer churn at this stage of the customer’s lifecycle.
Beyond this, a creating a customer journey map helps support your customer success journey in a number of different ways. Beyond creating a more customer-centric company culture, you’ll also be able to gain insight into how your customers actually think. This will allow you to better pinpoint your ideal buyer and create a buyer persona that better reflects your target market. It will also help you refine your inbound marketing efforts and increase your sales conversion rate. To do this though, you need to collect data and take it seriously; otherwise, you won’t have any insight into how your customers think.
Creating a customer success journey that is invested in the success of your customers is a challenge. But with tools from the digital era, such as a CRM and marketing automation platforms, you will be able to track exactly how customers interact with your marketing materials, sales team, and customer experience team. In creating a holistic customer journey map to better profile this, you will gain greater insight into how to best serve your customers. This approach takes a hybrid between a more data-driven method and a purely personal and relationship-based business, and allows customers and clients to feel like they are cared for while also allowing you to solve common problems and identify patterns in customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction.
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