When you respond to the queries that your customer has, you provide a seamless customer experience. That’s all there is to it. It takes a lot of effort to get there, though.
Let’s look at how customer journey maps contribute to a seamless customer experience. Even in its most primitive sense, a journey framework gives a framework to understand the priorities in customers’ lives when applied regularly. We’re all aware that many different versions of journey maps are being developed by well-intentioned and motivated teams, but completing the map does not guarantee behavior change or accountability.
Step 1: Develop a foundation for providing a seamless customer experience.
The use of a comprehensive and detailed journey framework allows the management team to make decisions about how to provide better client experiences. This shifts the focus away from trying to optimize all touchpoints and onto those that are most beneficial to consumers.
Your focus is then turned into purpose clarification, education and training, and the provision of a consistent experience. You can shift your focus to innovation and creating customer demand once you’ve regularly hit these points.
Step 2: Communicate in the same language.
You want your company’s leaders and employees to adapt their vocabulary and begin utilizing your stage names frequently when discussing their work and holding people accountable.
Before you dive into touchpoint mapping, use the customer journey stages to bring your executives together. Encourage your executive team to agree on how you’ll utilize a journey map to promote operational and cultural transformation. Leaders that are closely involved in these sometimes mind-bending exercises, in my experience at CustomerBliss, are the most cohesive in their communication and decision-making. Prior to journey mapping, having difficult conversations can be the impetus for a fantastic day that results in a company-wide transformation of communication, decision-making, and accountability.
Step 3: Define your goal.
You may have previously taken the effort to explicitly describe how your company enhances the lives of its customers. This has been demonstrated time and time again to be a necessary step to take. The aim of the organization must be clear enough to drive operational decisions. To accomplish this, it must be designed with the customer’s journey at its center. Without it, journey mapping activity risks being silo-centric rather than being guided by fundamental knowledge of how outcomes should benefit consumers’ lives.
How will your consumers’ lives be improved as a result of their interaction with you? Instead of focusing on what you want to accomplish in the marketplace, think about how they will gain from cooperating with you.
Focusing on the “why” elevates the organization’s work and motivates employees to take action in order to earn the right to customer-driven growth.
Step 4: Empower your employees.
Do we earn the right to grow? This is the essential shift that all leaders must embrace. And, along the way, leaders must agree on the priorities. At each level of the journey, leaders must be dedicated and clearly explain to the enterprise the purposeful experiences consumers are aiming to create. Your operational response to the questions that clients want to be addressed when they engage and do business with you is “experience” that leads to growth.
As customers connect with you, utilize your customer journey phases to compose the questions they’d like addressed at each level.
The journey phases and these questions should serve as a prism for directing strategic company direction and decision-making for your leadership team.
If a map like the one shown below is utilized regularly and consistently, the “outside-in” vs “inside out” perspective can assist leaders to guide the course.
Step 5: Outline the framework for a seamless customer experience.
The following are examples of a seamless customer experience with your company:
- • Take immediate action
- • Detailed information
- • Product, service, and process training
- • Employees that are empowered and knowledgeable
- • Completed connections and places of contact
- • Your company’s practices are constant and dependable.
The activity of establishing a flowchart does not ensure a seamless customer experience. It gives the foundation for making judgments about how to better the lives of consumers and how to handle important interactions. The company will have to put in a lot of effort to respond to your questions. You now have the framework in place to continue developing your seamless customer experience.
Finally, utilize this data to convey the tale of your consumers’ interactions with your company. As the phases are built and validated, come up with a unique approach to package and introduce them. Use the framework on a regular basis to talk about the progress you’ve achieved and any new client concerns or opportunities.
