Customer Journey Playbook
Delight your customers’ mentions simple ways to raise customer service to extraordinary level - Steve Curtin
Hey PMs, Today’s newsletter is brought to you by our partner Shortform.
Learn Faster. Get Smarter
Too busy to get through your reading list? Shortform offers comprehensive guides to thousands of nonfiction books so you can learn the world’s most important ideas. Book guides are offered in every genre, from self-improvement to finance, and feature smart insights, in-depth analyses, and interactive exercises to help you retain knowledge. Give Shortform a try with a 5-day free trial and 20% annual discount!
What is customer journey management?
Customer Journey management is the ongoing practice of researching, measuring, optimizing, and orchestrating a customer journey through deep customer insight, a clear journey framework, and a standardized way of working.
Customer journey management allows you to gain focus. Creating a customer journey map helps you to form a visual representation of customers’ processes, needs, and perceptions throughout their interactions and relationship with an organisation. It helps you understand and drive the steps customers take – the ones you see, and don’t – when they interact with your business.
Stages of customer journey management
Before we get more into best practices and common challenges, it’s important to understand the four basic pillars of customer journey management.
Data unification - you’ll need to have all of the data from all of the channels and customer touchpoints unified in one system
Customer segmentation - you’ll need to be able to segment your users into different buckets to engage with the right customers at the right stage of the journey
Customer engagement - you’ll need a way to engage those segments of customers, ideally in real-time or something near it, in their preferred channels (e-mail, SMS, push, social media, etc)
Analysis - you’ll need to be able to understand how customers are engaging with each step of the journey.
Why is customer journey management important?
Customer journey mapping gives you deeper insight into the customer, so you can go beyond what you already know. Many brands see the customer’s journey as something that is visible – where the customer interacts with the brand. But in reality, this is not true, and only accounts for a percentage of the entire journey.
Creating a customer journey map gets you thinking about the aspects of the journey you don’t see, but have equal weight and importance to the entire experience. When mapping out customer journeys, you are looking for the moments that matter – where there is the greatest emotional load.
Example If you’re buying a car, then the greatest moment of emotional load is when you go to pick the car up because it’s yours, after picking the colour, choosing the model, and waiting for it to be ready.
Customer journey management enables better experiences As you examine all phases of a customer’s journey with your brand, you’ll be able to isolate where you aren’t meeting expectations or where you are outright alienating prospects and customers. By addressing these shortcomings, you can ensure better experiences that empower your prospects and customers to interact with and purchase from your company as they desire. That can translate into faster sales cycles, and more satisfied, loyal customers who make follow-on purchases.
Pave the way for your customers to better achieve their goals You want your customers to succeed. To do that, you need to understand their experience by mapping the customer journey. This provides insight into what is – and isn’t working – well for them. By understanding the customer experience – both as it is and the ideal state – you can create, adjust, and enhance touchpoints to ensure the most effective, efficient buying and service process. As a result, your customers will be better able to achieve their goals, from their pre-purchase through their post-purchase experience, with your company.
Provides your company much-needed context Chances are, if you don’t understand the customer journey, you don’t know your customers well enough. In an age when hyper-personalization reigns supreme, a shallow understanding of your customers doesn’t suffice. By designing customer journey management, you will gain an invaluable and essential view of your potential and existing customers. This more complete picture positions you to realize a better return on your marketing investments, and equips everyone in your company to better engage with prospects and customers.
Position your business to drive better results A 2018 customer journey mapping report shows that 67% of customer experience professionals surveyed across the globe are using, or have used, customer journey mapping. Moreover, almost 90% of those using customer journey management said their program is delivering a positive impact, the most common one being an increase in customer satisfaction. Lower churn, fewer customer complaints, and higher NPS were also among the top impacts.
“Maximising satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20% but also lift revenue up by 15% while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20%”
– McKinsey, The Three Cs of Customer Satisfaction
The customer journey management framework
The step-by-step process of customer journey management begins with the buyer persona.
Step 1 – Create a customer persona to test
In order to effectively understand the journey you need to understand the customer – and this is where creating a persona really helps. You may base this around the most common or regular customers, big spend, or new customers you haven’t worked with before. This persona is beyond a marketing segment, but that can be a great place to begin if you’re just starting out on the mapping process for your organisation.
What do you include? Start with these characteristics.
Name, Age, Job role, Family status, Professional goals, Personal goals
These personas help you gain a deeper understanding of your customers and can be derived from insights and demographic data, or even customer interviews. This works for both B2B and B2C business models, but in B2B especially you’ll have multiple customers for each opportunity so it’s recommended you build out multiple personas.
To begin, start with no more than three personas to keep things simple.
Step 2 – Choose a journey to map
Select a journey to map, then build a behaviour line. This might be a new journey, renewal, or fixing a product issue. You might also choose this based on the most frequent journeys taken, or the most profitable.
Step 3 – Work through the mapping process
Ask yourself the following:
Who are the people involved in this journey?
What are the processes or the things that happen during this journey?
What are the customer attitudes?
What is the moment that matters? Identify the greatest moment of emotional load.
What are your customer needs at this moment? How do their needs change if this experience goes badly?
How do you measure how effectively you are meeting customer needs throughout the journey?
Step 4 – Innovate
Once you’ve created your map, brainstorm ideas for how to improve the moments that really matter. These ideas don’t need to be practical, but by putting together a diverse mapping team from around the business you can begin to filter through these ideas.
Then, test them.
Ask yourself: Is it feasible? Is it viable? Is it desirable? Don’t ask can we do it, ask: should we do it? Then you can start to differentiate yourself from your competitors.
Step 5 – Measure
Use your journey map to decide on your measurement framework.
Who are you measuring? What are you measuring? When on the journey are you measuring it? And why? And finally, what metrics and KPI’s are in place to measure this?
Step 6 – Take stock and take action
To improve the customer journey you need a clear vision of what you want to achieve and you need to make a distinction between the present and the future.
What is your customer journey right now?
What does the future state of your customer journey look like?
By understanding your customers’ attitudes and needs at critical times in the journey, you can begin your customer journey management and make amends to better meet them – and develop contingencies to cope when these needs aren’t or can’t be met.
You’ll need to orchestrate journeys using real-time customer behaviour to adapt your strategy as your customers make choices. Orchestrating a journey means taking dynamic action towards optimising your customer’s experience, using real-time customer behaviour as informative data.
Step 7 – Improve your employee experience
Use a diverse customer journey management team to come up with ideas that incorporate experience from all aspects of the business. Improving the employee journey – by giving teams the tools to make a difference – can have a positive knock-on effect for the customer and improve their experience in those key moments.
Common pitfalls to avoid
Too often this management can either become an academic exercise or difficult to get agreement on. Here’s how to avoid some of the common pitfalls and focus on delivering a remarkable customer experience.
Not Enough Detail It’s easy to build a one-dimensional map but something very simple is unlikely to help you to optimize your marketing performance.
Too Much Detail It’ a balancing act. If you try to go into too much detail you could spend forever trying to piece the journey together and getting an internal agreement.
Only Focusing On Part Of The Journey It can be tempting to only focus on a specific part of the customer journey; for example, the path from prospect to conversion or from initial conversion to multiple product holding.
Being Spontaneous & Subjective Getting a team together with a whiteboard can be a valuable part of the process. But be careful not to base your work on very rapid decisions or supposition. Be data-led.
Only Considering Marketing Touchpoints Your customers won’t distinguish between marketing communications (campaigns, events, and triggers), operational communications (statements, invoices), and service delivery.
🔥 Top three quotes from our Instagram page
Strategy is about making choices, and trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different. - Micheal Porter
The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and why. — Warren G Bennis
Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it. - Dwight D Eisenhower
📺 Tech Snippets
AI Day is here: Tesla is holding its second AI Day, where a humanoid “Optimus” prototype is expected to be revealed. Watch live on YouTube.
Instagram is testing a filter that will prevent users from DMing each other unsolicited nudes.
Screw text-to-image generators — Meta unveiled AI that can turn text into videos.
Calendly has acquired Prelude, an interview scheduling platform. It’s the $3B+ calendar company’s first acquisition.
Google released cool new ways to search, including a multisearch feature and an immersive view in Maps.
