Do you know how, where, when and why customers interact with your business? If not, you’re missing out on opportunities. Process improvement can help you map, visualise and optimise your customer journeys in order to exploit every advantage.

 

Customer journeys are complex and constantly evolving

A customer journey describes the full pathway of interactions someone has with your product, service or brand. It’s sometimes described as the path to purchase.

The customer journey is a complicated (and non-linear) one these days, with so many online and offline touchpoints. TV adverts, recommendations, business connections, reviews, internet search, newspapers, an overheard conversation, social media; the list goes on. Customers don’t necessarily separate these touchpoints; they expect a frictionless omnichannel experience that meets their needs.

Example of customer journey mapping

Example of a customer journey map in BusinessOptix

Source: BusinessOptix

Business processes and customer journeys are inextricably linked

You know what it’s like to be a customer. But do you know what it’s like to be a customer of your business?

Do you understand your customer journeys from start to finish? Not just parts of them – the whole thing. Where are the problems or pain points? What attracts people or pushes them away? Customers have so many options now, and can pick up or drop your brand very quickly.

Delivering customer excellence and achieving business objectives go hand in hand. Understanding the customer journey supplies insight with which to build better processes. And in turn, smoother processes help provide a better customer experience.

“People will sit up and take notice of you if you will sit up and take notice of what makes them sit up and take notice.”

A quote attributed to Harry Gordon Selfridge; this reinforces the importance of true customer understanding

Process improvement helps you optimise customer journeys

Creating a customer journey map – a visual representation – enables you to define, understand and improve your interactions.

Identify your customer personas and their behaviour

  • Define your customer personas. Who are your customers and what do they want or need?
  • Map and visualise the journey for each persona across all channels (online and offline). Each customer has a different journey, although there will be some crossover points
  • Consider whether you are reaching customers in the right way for them

Trial process improvements and monitor the effects

  • Analyse the role your people, processes and systems play in delivering the customer experience
  • Simulate changes and run scenarios to adjust elements of the process and improve outcomes for customer and business
  • Examine ways to make the experience more consistent, smoother and seamless across channels
  • Collaborate with stakeholders, share and review the models

Share journey map and empower team members to deliver

  • Create and distribute work instructions to support implementation of the new processes, particularly for directly customer-facing teams
  • Make the customer journey map accessible to everyone
  • Keep monitoring and adjusting the map to achieve continuous improvement

Start to improve your customer journeys today

The BusinessOptix platform will help you map, mine and model processes to create frictionless customer experiences. Let us show you how: claim your free BusinessOptix demo here

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