Consumers with access to multiple channels and touchpoints expect seamless, standardized, and personalized experiences. You must be aware of their preferences and expectations in order to tailor your experience to them. You must have a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey, informed by customer and data-driven insights, in order to meet their expectations.
Where do we start?
Let’s start with this idea: the mantra for a successful customer experience is “journeys, not touchpoints.” It means that while it’s important to consider the individual steps and touchpoints, moments of truth, and channels of the experience, it’s even more crucial to keep in mind the entire journey, or the end-to-end experience, that the customer has with your brand as he attempts to complete whatever it is he is attempting to do. You have the opportunity to design and deliver a remarkable customer experience by concentrating on the entire journey.
Why is this idea crucial? Because businesses think in terms of touchpoints, while customers think in terms of journeys. The consumer does not only consider the brand as a phone number or website.
When customers interact, they consider all of the steps necessary to make a purchase or find a solution to a problem. And to make the experience seamless, there are numerous touchpoints and steps that must all be connected.
A Connected Journey
By concentrating on touchpoints, organizational silos are reinforced, and since employees suffer from these silos, so do customers. Do you have experience making touchpoint maps? It was developed in collaboration with customers and records and inventories each different touchpoint experienced throughout the customer lifecycle or a particular journey. It draws a picture of how your brand affects consumers and how consumers affect your brand.
Making the map is not sufficient. Journey mapping is a process as well as a tool. After the map is made, the next step in the process is to enhance and enrich it with data. A great customer experience is designed and delivered using data as its foundation.
