Mapping the customer journey to deliver painless experiences

By Kojo Manuel

• Apply first principles to capture customer sentiments for improvements

It may seem a daunting task to map the customer journey, however, it is necessary to go through the process if you want to be intentional about delivering positive experiences to customers. The customer journey map is a visual storyline of every engagement a customer has with your brand as they pursue the quest of accessing a service, or product from you. Mapping the journey enables you to intuitively understand the consumer’s mind by following the customer’s processes, needs, and perceptions. It follows the customer right from the point where s/he engages your brand to the time of purchase.

Every milestone in that journey is a touchpoint. The journey map depicts the customer’s interaction and enables you to anticipate the customer’s expectations and behaviours anytime they engage with your brand. Developing a journey map is a proactive way of managing the customer experience as it gives you tangible feedback on what happens at your business touchpoints. The journey map starts right from the first principles. What is your brand purpose? How does it enable you to engage with and keep customers? The ease of access at your touchpoints could be a major determinant in their decision to “fight or flee”.

Here are some key components of the customer journey map. The Persona is the main actor, the customer. The customer is the person making the journey and the decision to either buy your product or not. The scenario in the experience context is where the decision to make the transaction is made, known technically as the “moment of truth”. In the journey, the customer will traverse several phases from inception to the final purchase. During the journey, the customer expresses thoughts and emotions which ultimately lead to a decision. Actions imply responses based on thoughts and emotions and others, these offer opportunities to capitalize on.

The customer journey will have several touchpoints where the engagements with the business will play up. As a business, your awareness of the journey and its touchpoints is very critical and needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency. The main touchpoints holistically are awareness where the customer becomes aware of the brand and develops an interest in finding out more.  Next is findability, where visibility is vital in ensuring that you are accessible at preferred points from the customer’s perspective. Following this is your reputation as this determines the choice from others.

The purchase decision follows next and then finally the point where the customer becomes an advocate or otherwise. These main touchpoints form the fulcrum of a well-knit customer journey map. The journey map is used to elevate the experience in the following ways. First, it is used as a storyboard to craft the experience. Second, it presents an opportunity to define your persona to pave the way for developing personalized experiences. Third, it enables you to follow the customer’s emotions and feelings during the journey. Fourth, it allows you to capture and hold ideas on service improvements. Fifth, it’s a strategic tool for attracting and retaining new customers.

The journey map: A storyboard

Storyboarding offers you a blueprint to dynamically design the customer journey based on your understanding of the customer’s needs. The goal is to be able to determine the needs of the customer from a viewpoint that weighs more on empathy than rational judgment. This understanding empowers your business to set the tone for improved experiences. it is a collaborative activity that involves the customer as well as actors within your business, from those who directly engage customers (frontliners) to those who offer services from the backend. It is about identifying scenarios and establishing clear boundaries for focused engagements.

Breaking things down this way allows you to examine the customer’s journey explicitly and address the needs of the customer granularly.  By examining the customer’s emotions and intentions at every touchpoint you are well-placed to anticipate what will serve the customer and even more importantly surprise or excite them. When the business has this holistic view of the customer every function is called to action. It is all about creating that single view and getting everyone aligned to the importance of serving the customer from the customer’s own viewpoint in other words thinking “outside-in”.

Uber used the “outside-in” thinking concept when the founders, friends Travis Kalanick and Garret Camp were attending a conference in Paris. It is said that they came up with the idea when they couldn’t find a cab on a stormy winter night. But what if they could order a cab using their mobile phones?  The pair returned to the USA and prototyped the idea using a mobile app they eventually launched a ride-sharing transportation business with the click of a button. Having experienced a challenge themselves getting transport they came up with the idea of making transport available from a remote distance using the app. The rest is history.

Defining your persona

The customer persona is a fictional, composite character that represents a segment of your audience based on customer research. It is a narrative description of user archetypes reflecting common patterns of behaviour, needs, and emotions. The persona reflects details about your target group that are easy to grasp. Personas are based on actual data representing the most salient attributes that distinguish one segment of your customers from another.  You determine the number of personas and then collect data that supports those attributes.  You are typically looking for demographics, behaviours, motivations, and pain points.

Developing a customer persona helps you determine your specific audience and ensures that you are speaking to your ideal customer’s needs, goals, and preferred channels for engaging your brand. This individual is representative of the market you are trying to reach. Having a customer persona as a business enables you to think about communicating the benefits of your product or service in terms of what they actually would potentially be looking for. Developing the persona from the perceived customer type forces you to think of your customers as people as opposed to focusing on them as abstract concepts.

This understanding helps you think about how to provide real value to your customers, which is ultimately what they seek and care about. The following approach is typical in determining a persona. You start by considering the individual as a loyal customer making a purchase decision. Your focus is on the moment the customer becomes aware and goes on to purchase through to when the subject leaves the company. As you reflect on the customer’s behaviour and other attributes your emphasis is on the cognitive and emotional states of the individual including moments of truth and satisfaction.

Capturing emotions and feelings

You started with your storyboard where you scoped out the customer journey from start to finish. You then went on to identify a fictional, composite character representing a segment of your audience based on your research of the customer type. Why is this important? If you capture, understand, and respond to consumers’ emotional needs in the proper context, you will be better able to deliver on the promise of brand consistency and ultimately give the competition a good run for their money. It improves your visibility as you give customers a good emotional feel about their interaction with your brand.

The truth is that customers expect from any brand known to them, a memorable, and, importantly, consistent experience at every touchpoint. Brand loyalty is like friendships, it takes time for customer relationships to develop. According to research, “76% of loyal customers say they have been with a brand for over 4 years”. When you humanize the customer experience, you speed up the process of converting new customers into emotionally invested loyalists. Emotions are very subjective yet they are potentially very important triggers for decision-making on the part of customers.

When I walk into a shop to purchase an item, I expect a reasonably good reception from the shop assistants. If one of them is in a bad mood and responds to me inappropriately during an interaction as a customer I may take it the wrong way. Consider this example when I walked into a shop in London admiring the collection of clothes. Now this shop assistant walks up to me and says, hey don’t buy from this shop there are better items in the next shop. Yes, I know a brother man was trying to help his fellow brother man (sic) but my thoughts were why would you point your left finger at where you feed from? Had my e motions ruled I probably would have heeded his call.

Service improvements

To tap into the authentic voice of your customer you need to develop effective insight-gathering strategies. The insights come from customer feedback. Knowing what your customers think and feel gives you a direct pipeline to their hearts and minds. Insights are more than just opinions and comments. They provide you with very accurate information on what’s working, what’s amiss and what needs fixing or refining. Understanding specific pain points leads you to uncover opportunities for innovation and improvement. Harnessing customer feedback paves the way for you to potentially elevate your customer experience.

The advantage of having a well-designed fit-for-purpose journey map is that your frontlines are very alert to the needs and concerns of your customers. One added advantage is that it enhances your capacity to promptly respond to customer feedback.  When you address customer feedback timeously you are well-placed to meet expectations, build trust, and resolve issues. This has the added advantage of encouraging continuous engagement. A prompt response helps to improve customer satisfaction and retain customers. My story about the resolution of a faulty self-checkout machine by handing me products for free at a supermarket is a case in point.

When customers know that you are listening to them and responding promptly by improving your services they are encouraged to keep connected with the brand. Timely response encourages them to give you more feedback and to interact more frequently thus keeping the communication channels open and active. This consistent engagement can lead to a more dynamic customer relationship, thus further enriching the customer experience. in today’s world, this has become much easier due to the availability of apps enabling you to prioritize requests and have a discourse with customers regularly thus closing the feedback loop in short cycles.

Strategic tool

Customer journey maps help you to see yourself from the customer’s perspective and to listen to them to try and understand their sentiments. When you develop the ability to use insights from your touchpoints accurately, you gain a competitive advantage in terms of better customer experience and increased customer satisfaction. Today’s world of digitization has made the customer journey a thing of interest at all levels in the organization. From the frontlines that engage the customer directly to the backend operatives and top executives, the customer journey is now everyone’s focus. According to Google, the term has twice as many searches today as in 2016.

Today’s world places less emphasis on product benefits as was the case in the past. There is a plethora of products that are duplications of existing ones. Focusing merely on your product qualities will leave you out of touch with customers who may have heard similar qualities echoed out to them elsewhere. The customer journey is therefore a very useful tool for brands to differentiate their offering and become more visible in the customer’s mind for the right reasons. The brand value is strengthened by enabling customers to have a holistic and positive brand experience across all touchpoints.

To stay aligned with customers your customer experience strategy must have strands from your business strategy in ways that ensure your performance in your customer experience has links with internal Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). For example, a touchpoint metric would address several indicators such as daily stock availability, website uptime, and price review. Furthermore, to address critical customer touchpoints you will ensure product availability, ease of use of the website, and price competitiveness. The goal is to keep the customer experience conversation top of mind at all levels.

Customer experience is about delivering out-of-world experiences to your customers, leaving them with memories that will keep them coming back for more. The customer journey from awareness to the final purchase and advocacy must be oriented to sustain the customer’s interest for as long as it takes. The journey map is a critical tool that enhances your ability to keep the customer engaged and emotionally attached to your brand, exclusively.