What do you do when you feel lost? Or Do you want to find a new way? Maybe you use google maps or your GPS. We need a plan to find the way, whether the best way, the faster, the scenic, long, busy, free route, and many options.
Most of the time, we don’t have a GPS or Google Maps to show us the direction our business needs to go. We need Journey Maps when we feel lost managing a business, or we may be lost our way to the customers’ needs and wants, or we need to get on track again.
Tons of research and experts agreed that customer experience drives profits. As a company manager, you need to focus on profits, saving costs, and managing resources. Prioritizing resources, taking opportunities, deciding where to start, and how many resources to invest requires a solution that is easy to implement and cost-effective.
Customer journey maps are a visual representation of the interactions between humans and your company. It is a tool that customer experience practitioners use to help a business like yours.
In a technology context, journey maps are about the steps a human follows to accomplish a goal. A journey map is all about the user and its actions, the storyboards, and use cases; in customer experience, we add the service journey to align offline and online processes.
How do humans use and experience the technology, and how do we capture those moments or interactions? Simple, use a customer journey map that will include technology, processes, people, and physical evidence.
There is a relationship between journey maps and understanding your customers, prospects, or ideal customer. A journey map will provide an overall view from where you can draw a plan; it will give you and your team a “360 view” of your company relationship and the human aspect of that relationship.
There are two approaches you could use today:
- Map individual interactions to pilot a customer experience program. It is the faster and easier route to start, provide quick wins, buy-in, and less resistance. It works well to adapt to sudden market changes as a pandemic or industry disruption or digitalization.
- Map the overall experience with a high-level customer journey; this works well for an established company or a small program for a new company. A high-level customer journey map provides the starting point to understand the relationship between the service promise and the service delivered. It is a long-term approach with quick non-structural changes at the beginning for quick wins and adds cumulative value over time.
Two points I want you to remember customer journey maps are living documents that adapt. And CX is a continuous improvement program.
As the customers or users evolve and market conditions change. Using customer journey maps keeps an alignment between your business promise, users’ or customers’ expectations, and how your employees deliver on that promise. And it will keep your business on the path to your customer’s and user’s hearts.
Customer journey maps give that emotional connection, that most business lacks. We talk about gain and losses; with a customer journey, we speak of awe and pain. We humanize technology and business, we see beyond profits, and we create human connections that are meaningful and productive.