You may refer to your business as a call center, but chances are you offer omnichannel solutions for customer service. Your current or potential clients should be able to reach you by phone, but today’s consumer expects other options, such as email, chat box, social media, or customized apps. They may also not answer phone calls but prefer that you reach out using another method, such as SMS.
While omnichannel communication improves customer service, it can also prove challenging to manage. You will need to monitor and maintain each channel, which all come with their distinct challenges. Creating a customer journey map can help your company handle these multiple communication avenues more efficiently.
What is a Customer Journey Map?
A customer journey map visually represents how customers interact with your business, brand, and services. It details every contact that a customer has with your brand. For example, a map should document how they first learned of your company and the times they interacted with your website, social media, or customer service team.
Using a customer journey map, you can learn how your customers think and react. What do they do when they have a question or complaint? How does your team respond? Do your clients drop off when using certain channels? Analyzing this information can enhance your interactions and improve customer recruitment and retention.
How to Setup a Customer Journey Map
Customer journey maps vary according to your business type, customer demographics, and communication channels. These tools help you identify how your customers interact with your business and establish the goals you want your customers to reach.
Some steps to take include:
- Set objectives for your map: What do you want to learn from the map? What data do you need to collect?
- Develop your customer personas: Consider using surveys to identify your main customer types. What are their sales and communication preferences?
- Identify your customer touchpoints: List the interactions between your customer personas and your business.
- Take the customer journey: Using your customer personas, have your team members take the customer journey themselves.
Customer journey maps are like any marketing tool. They require planning, data gathering, and analysis.
Understanding Your Customers
Knowing your target demographic is the first step in organizing a customer journey map. Determine what customer experience your clients expect and how your business can offer it. Age, income, gender and more impact consumer choices. Asking customers to take brief surveys is one of the best ways to determine your target consumer, but it is just the beginning. You will need to dig deeper to determine how to reach them.
Organizing Touchpoints
Setting touchpoints will allow you to monitor how and when customers interact with your business. These are events and milestones customers should reach. Touchpoints include reaching out via social media, clicking on an online ad, online shopping, eCommerce purchases, visits to a brick-and-mortar store, service representative contacts, etc. Identifying these touchpoints will help you improve customer conversion rates and individual satisfaction levels.
Collect Feedback from Your Customers
Customer experience is essential, especially after an interaction. Collecting customer feedback can provide insight into the drop off points in your customer communications. You can learn what triggers them to abort a purchase or end a chat with your company. For example, is it perceived bad service or dissatisfaction with the product? This can provide valuable insight as if, for example, customers consistently drop off during a chat experience, you would know to rework and improve that process.
Monitoring Your Communication Channels
Some communication channels are more effective than others and are affected by several factors, including demographics. For example, consumers aged 20 – 29 are most likely to use social media, while consumers aged 18 – 34 are more likely to use chat boxes than other age groups. However, chat communication is popular with most consumers who prefer to communicate in real-time with your company.
By monitoring your communication channels, you can determine which are the most effective for your company and which need more attention. This step can help you better allocate resources to channels that excel or need more assistance.
Emphasizing Omnichannel Marketing
Practicing omnichannel marketing is only effective if you understand your customer base. If your clients scorn email communications, spending much time on that forum wastes time and money.
Creating a customer journey map helps you identify which communication channel your customers prefer, whether it be social media, chat, or phone calls. This information lets your sales and service teams focus on the most productive communication methods. You may decide to drop some efforts or take measures to improve them. In any case, you will learn what works and why allowing you to reach your customers in a way they prefer.
