Customer journey maps are a critical component of many organizations’ customer experience (CX) framework. Yet many struggle to successfully incorporate them into their CX efforts. Gartner’s Jane-Anne Mennella offers CX leaders’ insights on three steps to utilize journey maps effectively in their CX initiatives to improve customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.
Journey maps are an essential component of the customer experience (CX) framework that organizations need to deliver and prioritize effective, relevant, innovative customer experiences. CX leaders have long understood the value of journey maps and the impact they have on an organization’s ability to meet or exceed customer expectations. However, Gartner research shows that nearly one-third of organizations still face difficulty incorporating them into their CX initiatives. Common reasons as to why these valuable assets fail to live up to expectations include:
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The journey mapping team is too siloed: The customer journey consists of touchpoints and interactions that involve many different areas and teams in an organization. Yet, often only one department is involved in the creation of journey maps and fail to obtain or incorporate data and insights from those areas.
The customer journey map tries to be all things to all customers: Â CX leaders who try to determine the journey for all of their customers end up with unwieldy maps that are too broad to deliver actionable insights. Different personas with different attributes and goals will not only have different journeys but also have varying needs, expectations and sentiments along that journey.
The scope of the customer journey is insufficient: Journey maps often fail to encompass the entire journey customers have with brands. These limited scope maps neglect pre-purchase events and rarely extend beyond post-purchase activities, causing organizations to miss important opportunities to improve satisfaction and cultivate awareness, loyalty and advocacy.
The customer journey map is based on company perspective and opinion: Â Many customer journey maps initiatives start and end with employee opinion dictating the journey their customers take, rather than building the journey based upon on actual customer data, feedback and analysis.
The customer journey mapping initiative has the wrong goal: Too many teams think the end deliverable of a journey map is a pretty graphic image instead of the identification of issues and opportunities that exist to improve the experience, and the efforts to gain consensus and commitment to the strategies to address them.
So how can CX leaders and their organizations utilize journey maps effectively in their CX initiatives to improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy?
Build a strong foundation first:Â Before building a journey map, CX leaders should affirm leadership and key stakeholder support and build a cross-functional team composed of representatives from all departments who support the CX. Be sure to assess available data sources and needs, and determine whose journey it is you are mapping (at Gartner, we recommend our clients map the journeys for their personas).
Use customer perspective and data:Â Building successful customer journeys requires understanding the entire journey your customers take. This means capturing touchpoints that occur from the moment a need arises for customers, past purchase and ownership through to loyalty, satisfaction, and/or advocacy. What these touchpoints are and how customers feel and what they think or do at each of them should come from the perspective and data of your actual customers. Lastly, CX teams should consider validating the data included in the journey with real customers to ensure it accurately reflects their experiences, feelings, thoughts, and actions.
Cultivate continued value from journey maps:Â Even when journey maps are built correctly, they can still fail due to a lack of action after the design phase. To get maximum value from customer journey maps, CX leaders must turn the insights derived from their journey maps into strategies and tactics to deliver the experiences their customers need. They must also ensure those journey maps evolve and change as customer needs and goals change. And, to continue to drive and maintain support, CX leaders should develop an internal communications plan for key stakeholders that reinforces progress toward realizing the customer’s desired journey.
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Whether you are new to or experienced with the journey mapping processes, incorporating these recommended steps into the process will help obtain the actionable insights and results that journey maps are designed to deliver.