A customer journey map (CJM) is an incredibly useful tool when it comes to understanding and improving your customer experience.
If you’ve got a great CJM it can really help you understand how your customers see things at key touch points in their journey. This will not only will enable you to see how your customers interact with you today, but also identify opportunities for improvement going forward.
There’s no such thing as a standard CJM – you can design one incorporating high tech design principles, or even by simply using smiley faces. However, if it’s going to be of any use – you need to take the following criteria into consideration:
- Take the customers’ perspective: Describe the customer experience from the customer’s perspective, using customer-friendly terms. Jargon, including any term that is not familiar to or not used by customers, should be banned!
- Do your research. The CJM should be built with input and involvement from multiple departments that touch the customer’s interaction with the company. This will often require a series of interviews and workshops throughout the process. You could even bring in your customers and build it interactively with your staff.
- Represent Customer segments. Customer journey mapping can be used to segment user groups in order to personalise the experience they receive. What may be relevant to one consumer may not be relevant to another and it is important to address this when mapping out a prospective consumer’s journey in order for them to receive the best possible experience.
- Include Customer goals. A great customer journey map shows your customer’s goals at each stage of the process. Bear in mind that goals can change as the process unfolds…
- Focus on emotions. Emotions are critical to any experience and a great customer journey map incorporates and reflects the emotional, experiential, and functional elements of the customer experience. The emotional refers to how a customer is feeling, experiential refers to what a customer experiences, and functional refers to the logistics of how it happens.
- Represent touch points. The CJM is often built to communicate the order and type of touch points – including those not in your control.
- Highlight moments of truth. Some interactions have more impact than others. Great journey maps separate those critical moments of truth from the rest. For example, when visiting a hotel, a poor service at check-in can taint the rest of the experience.
- Measure your brand promise. A critical outcome of a great CJM is measuring how your experience supports your brand promise. If your brand promise is to be either effortless, highly customised, or unique, then your journey map is an excellent way to find out whether your customer feels you are meeting that goal.
- Keep it simple: Make it easy to follow and appropriate for a wide variety of levels and functions.
Have you created a CJM which has enabled you to make positive improvements to your customer experience? We’d love to hear your stories. Use the buttons below to share via social media.
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Sarah Jenkinson
PR and Communication Manager
Customer Experience Magazine
Email: SJ@customerexperiencemagazine.co.uk
Telephone: 020 7558 8241 020 7558 8241.
I am passionate about Customer Experience and love hearing about all the wonderful things companies are doing to put the customer at the heart of their business. In my role at Awards International I manage the blogs on our Awards websites, I write articles for Customer Experience Magazine and support our clients with all the PR opportunities that being involved in our Awards brings.
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