CIOInsider India Magazine

With a customer journey map, brands can study ,b>customer touchpoints to create a lasting customer engagement experience till they gain their loyalty. A lot of modern-day companies are able to map out their digital customer journey, with few even being able to predict what the next requirement will be. These companies are able to consistently maintain that to keep at-risk customers in the funnel, while connecting their touchpoints on the ,b>user journey map. This is made achievable through a persistent customer journey mapping by working on touchpoint optimization right from the first interaction between the customer and the brand.

Today’s customers expect brands to remember the last conversation they had with each other about their preferences and demands.

For this very purpose, a journey facilitator paints studying the experiences through each stage. All the way it makes way for recommendations regarding changes which can keep the churn and friction at minimal levels as it can.

If you are looking to make your customer journey map to extend its capabilities, through growing sales, beyond a graphical representation, then it’s recommended to picture it as a process rather than just a one-time project.

The core principles of customer journey management lies in the maintenance of providing excellent customer service at every touchpoint and framing a clear plan to guarantee customer satisfaction (CSAT).

Picture the Journey One Step At a Time
A customer journey management is the combination of various components and procedures that interlinked with one another, leading to a much improved customer satisfaction and company expansion.

Step by Step Approach
First, you have to picture what step the customer takes one after another, right from their first interaction with the company till the product is purchased. This way you can have a clear map of the customer journey that shows you which are the places that need a little tweaking and the pain-points with the use of this procedure.

Design a Unified Omnichannel
To get a depiction of the touchpoints your company uses, business executives can design a unified omnichannel journey map that helps facilitate engagement with customers across numerous channels by using a visual, state-of-the-art journey builder.

Orchestration
The process of orchestration entails a synchrony of various channels and touchpoints to chalk out a unified and smooth customer experience. This gives an assurance that every exchange is in accordance with the main strategy for the customer journey. Here, it is key to create a captivating digital and physical experience as a part of the designing process of the customer journey.

During CEO Insights India magazine’s recent interaction with Genesys’ Managing Director - India, Raja Lakshmipahy denoted that, “With generative AI and conversational AI possessing advanced capabilities / NLP (natural language processing) not only can you understand the sentiment, tone or topic that a customer is trying to convey, but you can also orchestrate or personalize the response.”

He further went on to say, “Using AI you can analyze the journey across multiple channels that a customer goes through. It also predicts the intention from who the customer is and what he or she is trying to do, to recommend what is the next best action for them. Once you understand that it also helps in predicting the best agent who is suited to address this particular requirement”.

He added that, “Cloud, AI, ML, big data, generative AI, conversational AI among others, have completely reshaped the kind of experience for customers”.

Study in Detail
Analytics helps businesses to accumulate and study intrinsic details about customer interactions, throwing insight into their behavior, preferences and problems. This can help discover consumer preferences, motivations and reasons affecting their decision making process through consumer insights from unprocessed behavioral data.

Verification Allows for Changes
It is considered a good practice to always verify your assumptions with customers by asking them whether your journey map accurately encapsulates each experience. This opens the house to more modifications by allowing each customer to express their needs.

Confirm Your Assumptions
During this time, you get an idea of the nuances in their experiences even if it happens to fall true to the assumptions you had thought before. This can help you build focus on the areas of your sales and marketing procedures that are effective and in areas that call for refinement.

Stick to Your Ideal Customer Profile
You have to select those customers and prospects that can sync with your ideal customer profile. Therefore, the information which you collect must be reliable as to help you get a good understanding of your clientele.

Measure the Weight of the Modifications You Make
Since a customer journey map’s purpose is to serve as an enhancer to their experience to improve sales and retention, you will need to have a mechanism to measure the impact of your modifications. You must make sure of the important KPIs needed for every level of your customer journey by showing the amount of people advancing to the next. This can start from the problem stage, then move to the awareness stage and then to consideration, purchase, fulfillment till the loyalty stage.

Make a Dashboard to Watch Your Progress
Once you have decided on the methods for each stage of your customer journey, make a report or a dashboard to regularly access the data and watch your progress. These methods will expose the areas needing improvement. Additional insights might have been discovered by validating it with clients and prospects. After this you need to make a catalog of these areas that need improvement through two ways. First is the difficulty level where you can make a combination starting from easy, medium to challenging including the time and team effort, financial resources and obstacles. Second, is Impact which can be measured from the other way around, that is, challenging, medium and easy. Here aspects encompass financial impact, customer satisfaction and benefits to employees.

Next, divide the list in order by the methods that had a greater impact and ease of completion, starting from the easy stage and then you can sort a criteria of what makes the most sense for the rest of the methods.

Get a Company-based Perspective
Originally, the sales and marketing procedures are formed from the perspective of customers in a customer journey map. But, you can also see these procedures through the eyes of your company experience which includes your team members, vendors and needed contractors during interactions with potential customers and in providing products or services. Hence, it is recommended to ink a connection between customers and the company experiences which can go two ways. First, you can add a row to you customer journey map, listing the internal procedures for each stage to align your company’s processes with their journey. Second, make a map of how far the company has progressed and compare the two.

Cross-Department Collaboration
Improving customer satisfaction is a responsibility of every member of the company. You need to distribute your customer journey map along with your development strategies for the entire company. Today, cross-departmental collaboration in acquiring the size of your firm is considered important. Since involving team members early in the process helps discover areas for development and necessary opinions can be shared.

Keep Up With the Pace of Changes
The words on your customer journey map can appear static, but the route of your ideal customer is dynamic as it tends to evolve. Thus, there will be few changes every now and then, but certain aspects may still remain the same. Therefore, it is important to keep up with the changes in the consumer taste and the market to update your customer journey map appropriately. If not, your journey map and what is happening in reality may eventually fall out of place, leading to a detrimental effect on your sales. Stay on the lookout for technology advancements, competitors and customer demands. Show the results of your work during the previous year and make way for fresh areas of development.