In a multi-channel contact centre, customers interact with your business in all kinds of ways - across multiple channels. Increasing customer satisfaction – and your revenue – requires an understanding of these interactions and how they can be improved.
Customer journey mapping enables you to map your expectation of customer experience, with your customers’ reality of interacting with your organisation. A Customer Journey Map will help you to visualise the entire journey of a given customer through a given process, from evaluating a product or service to getting support. It’s an effective way to see things from your customers’ perspective and ensure your processes are centred on their needs and behaviours.
To get you started, here are the three steps required to map your customer journey and improve customer experience.
Stage 1: Create your customer journey map
Mapping your customer journeys begins with segmenting everything your contact centre does for customers into its own distinct journey. However, it’s important to do this from the viewpoint of your customers, not your contact centre.
When a customer goes through a typical journey like making a purchase, they may interact with a whole range of individuals, teams, and departments. They could even use multiple channels, like telephone, your website, email, and live chat.
Consider each point of contact as part of a seamless customer journey - getting them from where they are to where they want to be. Along that journey, service needs to be seamless whether a customer is receiving a call from an agent or receiving a message through SMS.
As you begin to segment your customer journeys, you will likely find they fall into common categories like:
Purchase journey
Customer onboarding journey
Customer support journey
Renewals journey
Once you have defined the various journeys your customers will go on, you can begin to drill down into how those journeys work and what customers experience at every stage. When someone sends in an email request, do they receive the same answer as someone who asks the same question on chat? These are the things you are looking for when you create your map.
Remember, your Map will chart out the experience you want them to have.
Stage 2: Gather research on each of your journeys
Now that you have your map and you know what experience you want your customers to have, start to gather data to determine if your expectations match the reality of your current customer experience.
An effective customer journey map captures more than a list of interactions. It should also highlight how customers feel at different stages of the journey, as well as those critical moments where loyalty is fostered or lost.
Data and research will help you to understand the stages of each journey, as well as qualitative data about how customers feel in each stage. You can source this both from within your contact centre and from your customers.
Sourcing data from your customers
Most of your qualitative data will come from your customers themselves. Preparing an interview, conducting a survey, or looking at discussions on social media could help you improve your understanding of customer experience at various stages of the journey. This information can inform both the stages of a customer journey you may be missing, as well as which stages are the most important to delivering great customer experience.
Sourcing data directly
Your contact centre is also likely to have access to masses of data that you can use to understand the customer journey. Web analytics, for example, can show customer journeys through your website and track progress towards a purchase or interaction. Meanwhile, mystery shopping and interviews / observations with your staff and internal stakeholders can be a powerful way to conduct internal research.
Stage 3: Getting value from customer journey mapping
Once you have gathered data and research, there are numerous ways each customer journey can be presented. Some contact centres use icons to illustrate customer satisfaction in every interaction, while others will highlight the most crucial opportunities to exceed expectations.
Often, the mere process of preparing and mapping customer journeys is enough to start finding value. In many cases, defining and recording a journey shows you overlaps in the activities of different teams, or places where journeys are disjointed and customers are not elegantly led to the next stage.
From there, you can optimise and improve your maps to design a better customer experience. Experimenting within your map is a great way to see the potential impact of a change and establish the high service standards that you expect on every channel that your contact centre handles.
By using customer journey mapping to deliver these standards consistently, you can dramatically increase customer satisfaction, build loyal long-term relationships, and turn every customer into a passionate advocate.
At Hostcomm, we support our client by ensuring their cloud contact centre technology is configured to support their customer journeys.
Contact our team for more information about how we can help.
