Written by Versions Collective
Keeping up with the modern consumer’s changing tastes can be a challenge, but business depends on it. Customers are interacting constantly with brands across multiple channels and platforms, with many companies lacking the ability to connect the dots across this landscape. The question becomes: How do we measure, improve and deliver the best possible customer experience while highlighting brand value and promoting conversion?
It may seem as though it’s a wide net to cast, but businesses need to take a step back to see the ten-thousand-foot view, evaluating whether content presented matches the targeted audience’s persona(s). In our experience as a digital agency advising brands on how to connect authentically with their customers, an invaluable tool for this evaluation is the customer journey map.
Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journey mapping helps to visualize a customer’s experience from their specific point of view, across all the various touchpoints they have with a brand as they seek to achieve a specific goal leading to conversion. The resulting visualization emphasizes a high level of clarity and transparency, allowing companies to better serve their customer and effectively target its own objectives and goals.
Relevant not only to customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) strategy, marketing teams, designers and strategists across industries — particularly in the digital environment — are poised to forge optimized customer relations by implementing and expanding the scope of their organization’s CX initiatives.
In fact, according to a 2016 study, companies saw a 54% greater return on marketing investment with customer journey management versus 16.2% without.
A Traveler’s Perspective
Customers interact with a brand because they connect emotionally and/or need a problem solved. Thriving companies drive this strategic growth by delivering experiences that meet these customer needs, generating relationships that leave customers wanting more.
A successful interaction hinges on the brand meeting these expectations in a meaningful way. Simply put, if this core connection doesn’t exist, customers will go elsewhere. The key is finding an effective tool to formulate and deliver this customer experience. Journey mapping does just that by encouraging stakeholders to consider the customer’s needs, wants, emotions and questions, and to create the path to fulfill those needs.
A Compass For The Journey
Whether for a digital experience, product or service, a journey map can take many forms. In designing a website, the goal remains: Help a company effectively key into and address their customers’ needs while communicating their brand voice. Tracing the steps that a customer takes in engaging with the experience, journey maps are high level, usually presented in a single layout visual representation, and combine visualization, data and insight.
Dedicated to customer experience innovators and change agents, technology company Oracle is a great place to start. With templates, toolkits and presentation resources compiled by customer experience professionals, DesigningCX illustrates the value and importance of CX initiatives.
Equipped with the tools to identify key interactions a customer has with their brand, no longer are CX initiatives like journey mapping for just customer-centric organizations. Focusing either on the entire experience or optimizing a specific section, journey mapping has become standard practice. The process uncovers clues to a customer’s intrinsic motivation and their expectations of a brand, providing brand teams with the data needed to provide an optimized experience.
Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?
Stories That Lead To Conversion
We’ve come to learn the value of visual storytelling in design, but journey mapping lays the groundwork for these creative implementations. Setting the course for the customer experience, journey mapping directs the story from initial impressions through the process of discovery and engagement, ultimately leading to conversions and a sustainable relationship.
Journey maps establish trust with the user, support growth and empathy with the brand and promote strategy-based decision-making within the organization. These actions go beyond simply capturing and representing data in a visual format — they reveal a story about the customer’s subjective, personal experience.
From sales to design to content strategy, a customer journey map is a tool that should be included in every brand’s digital strategy. Teams can gain a better understanding of where the user has come from and what they are trying to achieve, helping to identify opportunities that will enhance and differentiate the experience.
Foremost, a journey map puts the the user top of mind for an organization, creating an environment of constant optimization and adaptation, leading to overall growth and customer satisfaction.
Original Article at: Forbes.com