Customer Experience specialist Ian Golding, author of new book Customer What: The Honest and Practical Guide to Customer Experience, writes for Customer Experience Magazine, offering his expert insight to help businesses improve their CX offering.
To ask Ian a question on how to boost the Customer Experience provided by YOUR business, please email your question to editor@cxm.world. The best questions will be featured in future instalments.
Ian also leads the Customer Experience Masterclass and the CCXP Exam Preparation Workshop, both of which can be booked now for dates in October.
‘As a small business owner, time is limited for me, but I am very interested in charting out a customer journey map. How can I identify all my touchpoints and create an effective map on a tight schedule?’
What a lovely question! Lovely, because Customer Experience principles, methodologies, tools, and techniques, are as applicable to a small business as they are to a large corporation.
Creating a visualisation of the customer journey in the form of a map is one of the most important ‘tools’ of all. However, it is very important to recognise that creating the journey itself is only one component part of a bigger purpose – that purpose being to embed a culture of customer journey management (a continuous, never-ending cycle of activity).
Creating a customer journey map is not an exact science – there is no ‘standard’ or ‘right’ way of doing it. It is also not something that needs to be complex or difficult to do. In fact, I always argue that the ‘secret’ (if I can call it that) to effective journey mapping is to keep it simple.
As a small business owner, I would suggest the simplest way to do it is to quite literally to ‘put yourself in your customers shoes’. Spend a day doing exactly what your customer does throughout their experience with you.
Try and phone your company. Go on to your website to find the information you need. Do what your customer does. Instead of creating a ‘map’, you may want to ‘draw’ a typical day in the life of your customer. Understanding everything a typical customer does (not just when they interact with you) – from the minute they wake up, to the minute they go to bed, will enable you to understand how well (or not) you are fitting into their lives.
If you can, run your ‘day in the life of a customer’ past a real customer of yours – validate that what you think they go through is correct. Validate that you clearly understand their ‘pain points’ so you can identify the small number of opportunities that will have the greatest effect on their perception of your business and as a result, the greatest effect on your commercial performance.
Remember at all times to keep it simple. The key is to act on the priorities for improvement and to revisit the journey so you are able to manage its continuous improvement over time.