Customer experience (CX) has become a key differentiator for many brands, replacing products and price. Consumers are willing to pay up to 16% more for a product or service if the company provides a great customer experience.
The path to improving CX starts with customer journey mapping: providing a roadmap of how customers interact with your brand — from initial research and discovery to purchase and post-purchase encounters (e.g., customer service).
Enhance the Entire Customer Experience
Creating a robust and effective customer journey strategy should be a priority for your business, and that means taking a proactive rather than reactive approach to designing excellent CX.
A customer journey map (CJM) helps you visualize interactions from your customers’ perspective, giving you a deeper understanding of their needs and pain points. This is essential for designing customer-centric experiences that foster loyalty. Brands that recognize the importance of customer journey mapping stand out from the competition.
Why Customer Journey Mapping Is Important
Having the best product on the market isn’t always enough to keep customers coming back. In fact, 84% of today’s consumers rate the experience companies provide as being just as meaningful as their products and services.
This means customers place high value on their interactions with your business. Creating a CJM helps your team identify and analyze every interaction and pain point on the user journey. By gathering insight and shaping the journey accordingly, you will enhance the customer experience, boost conversions and improve retention rates.
Why Is the Customer Journey Important for Digital Marketing?
A CJM illustrates exactly how customers interact with your brand from a sales and marketing perspective. Understanding the customer journey across the funnel will help you develop digital marketing strategies that are effective, optimized and adapted to improve the user experience at every touch point.
5 Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journey mapping helps your business:
1. Understand customers
Using a customer journey map helps you empathize with your customers. Using real-world insights, you can identify pain points and areas your business can improve. A robust CJM will equip you to challenge assumptions and understand that customers sometimes act in ways you cannot predict.
Understanding friction points and frustrations will help you streamline your operations and proactively prevent churn.
2. Improve return on investment (ROI)
Your marketing efforts are costly, so retaining your customers is vital to boosting your ROI. Customer journey mapping provides opportunities to improve your operations and interactions, leading to satisfied customers, brand loyalty and advocacy.
3. Identify gaps and unmet needs
Mapping how your customers navigate across their journey gives your business insight into potential roadblocks. For example, if clients have trouble logging in to your payment portal, you can take steps to improve the login process. A CJM identifies critical touch points for customer engagement and allocates resources to enhance interactions and satisfy user needs.
4. Create more personalized experiences
In a digital world, your customers expect personalization. Mapping helps you dig deeper into customer intent and interactions. You can then leverage those insights to tailor experiences across all channels.
5. Enhance cross-departmental collaboration
Customer journey mapping helps you connect your departments and establish a collaborative environment. Facilitating ways for your teams to work together by breaking down silos between departments is essential for developing a full picture of your operation, delivering consistent experiences across departments and achieving greater customer satisfaction.
Obstacles to Successful Customer Journey Mapping
Successfully mapping the customer journey can be challenging for many reasons, including:
- Siloed data: Gathering accurate, real-time customer data across channels and departments (e.g., sales and marketing, billing, customer service) is difficult without a customer data platform.
- Customer variability: Customers are individuals—each with unique preferences and journey paths—so accurately mapping individual journeys takes a great deal of work. You need journey analytics with customer segmentation capabilities to create meaningful journey maps.
- Subjectivity and assumptions: Assuming that customers behave in specific ways can be dangerous. Incorrect assumptions may derail CX improvement efforts. Your business must validate hypotheses with customer feedback and data analytics.
- Lack of internal alignment: Successful mapping requires input from various departments. It’s difficult to achieve enterprise-wide alignment and eradicate silos. The first step to making it happen is creating a culture of customer centricity.
The need for ongoing updates: CX is dynamic and evolving—not static. To keep up with changing market patterns and customer needs and preferences, CX teams must continuously analyze and update journey maps. To improve CX, you need to implement journey analytics and journey orchestration tools that allow you to continuously evaluate and improve customer journeys.
CSG Xponent Ignite: The Solution for Continual Journey Mapping and Orchestration
CSG’s award-winning customer engagement solutions can help you overcome those challenges. Using CSG Xponent Ignite, you can quickly orchestrate customer journeys that enhance engagement on every communication channel. The foundation of Xponent Ignite is CSG Xponent, our industry-leading customer journey management solution that combines a customer data platform with journey analytics and journey orchestration to guide customers to the next best action. Our team will help you build a business case, identify the high-value journeys to start with (based on expected ROI), and launch easily using pre-built customer journeys for four industries: telecommunications, financial services, retail and healthcare.
Your Trusted CX Solutions Provider and Partner
CSG is a purpose-driven software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform company with over 40 years of experience. We provide:
- Expertise: Our team of global experts is dedicated to helping you succeed in any environment.
- Award-winning products: Forrester Wave™ has recognized our journey orchestration platform for being a leading product.
Exceptional service: CSG doesn’t see customer care as just nice to have. For us, it’s a key business driver. We deliver the best care and empower you to do the same.
Speak to an Expert About Customer Journey Management
To remain relevant, you must proactively improve the customer experience, anticipating customer needs and winning loyalty. CSG has served thousands of clients, and we have the tools and knowledge to help you develop and deploy a customer journey strategy that delivers unforgettable experiences.
Your business can connect with customers more effectively than ever with our solutions. Speak to an expert today to get started.
