Customer experience mapping is simply defined to be the journey undertaken by each customer towards making a decision in their investments and purchases of goods and services. Customers always enrich the demand that the corporate organizations need to fulfill. This demand creates unique opportunities for organizations producing similar products or providing relational services towards increasing the level of supply while enhancing the satisfaction of their clients. The differentiation of tastes and preferences of clients does also increase the opportunity towards creating and increasing demand.
Customer Experience Mapping – Best Practices
Methods
There are two main methodologies utilized while creating a map of the customers experience and they include:
- Best practices – These are the practices that are guaranteed to accrue a good level of success in influencing the journey of customer’s experience.
- Common pitfalls – These have to do with the main strategies that do drive away customers as a result of bad or negative experiences. It is important to know what makes the customers in their varieties, change their motivational journey towards achieving a great experience with your company.
Steps to Take
The first thing you do need to know is that as an organization you will be dealing with a variety of individuals who come from different backgrounds, cultures and societies. They each articulate their own norms and beliefs and have also uniquely formulated their own tastes and preferences. To that accord, it is best to first understand that having one customer experience mapping will not be sufficient to increase demand in your company. Therefore, you do need to create several different types of customer experience mapping in order to not overlook the fact that every customer will have a different appeal to their respective journeys.
There some steps that you can apply in the process of creating the map for customer experience and they include:
1. Story board the customer’s experience. This involves creating a storyboard that indicates the overall experience of the customers through each stage of journey.
2. Ideology session. In this process the staff of the organization do have to be very creative in coming up with ideas of how the customer experience mapping can serve multiple customers uniquely.
3. Identify unique scenarios in which the map of the customer experience will define each stage of the journey. These scenarios should not be direct but rather challenging enough to offer the production of unique ideas.
4. Identification of customer issues in the mapped journey. This requires a lot of attention as the staff of an organization need to view this process from the customer’s point of view. They need to articulately identify any problem that may arise and thus cause a discomfort or completely change the customers’ journey to a negative one.
5. Creation of solutions. This is a very important step as the problems already identified in the previous step will require solutions in order to enhance the level of satisfaction acquired by the customers.
6. Implementation of the created maps for customer experience. The organization needs to have all the clients mastering the created maps well enough and practice them among themselves in order to effectively implement them without errors.
7. Analyze potential future problems that may arise. This is not easy as one can never predict the future event to complete accuracy but in this process organizations can collect customer information in order to conduct these predictions and avoid these pitfalls beforehand.
8. Return of investment analysis should also be primarily conducted in order to verify whether the organization is creating enough potential room for success or failure.
9. Conduct calculations of the maps created based on some focused assumptions.
The best ways for organizations to be assured that they are on the right track in creating maps for the customer’s experience they need to:
1. Conduct an interview with the staff within the company that has formulated close relationships with the customers. These individuals in the company can be able to provide direct details of the customers experience and this data will be very useful in this process.
2. Conduct an interview with the individuals that do own customer data. These individuals will be able to provide an in-depth understanding of the customer data and also provide sufficient information that will author the direction of the maps.
3. Utilize the data collected from this research and keep this data flowing in order to enhance the functions of each stage of the maps.
4. Integrate the usage of technology to continually collect more customer data for the organization’s analysis and predictions of the future potential results.
Types of customer experience mapping
There are many types of customer experience maps and some of these maps include:
- Data maps – These are mainly made under the collected data of customer’s profiles that is standardized for integration.
- Communication maps – These maps are very widely focused on the model of communication that should be applied by the organization towards the clients. For example, majority of the organization do state a need to always have a very friendly tone while communicating with the clients whether they do purchase or not. This automatically builds a trust bond as well provides clients with the space they need to conduct their full inquiries.
- Process maps – These maps define the process at which different clients with different tastes and preferences do arrive at their respective points of satisfaction.
- Web optimization maps that are also known as contact optimization maps – These maps have mainly to do the communication channels used by the organization towards their global clients as they communicate directly through online channels.
- Experience maps – These maps are mainly used to firmly create a visualized format of the main information that is valuable to both the business and the customers. It is essential as it does directly indicate the points at which the customers will gain the highest level of satisfaction and also pinpoint how this satisfaction does alter or produce the bottom line results.
- Life-cycle maps – These maps are meant to initially focus on getting the customers experience throughout their life-cycle and work towards understanding this life-cycle of their customers. This will create a bond that is customer relational enhancing the freedom of the open platform to invest and gain full satisfaction
Conclusion
Creating a map that will author the experience of customers will enhance the potential of creating greater success in any organization. Customer experience mapping should be vitally conducted with upholding the customers with the highest esteem in acquiring satisfaction.