Build the right journey map for your customers with CCM tools

Kartikeya Awasthi

Customer Journey Mapping

How many of us can claim that we know our customers really well?

I think none of us have really stepped into the customer’s shoes and experienced their story. Often customers demand experiences that are highly interactive and responsive, but businesses today have failed to apprehend the true value of building customer relationships.

To ensure that customer expectations are duly met, brands must use a customer journey mapping tool to understand the user behavior at each phase of buying journey. Customer Journey Mapping or CJM refers to the best practices and tools that depict the stages that a customer goes through. Accordingly, it creates a suitable path for businesses based on the customer’s behavior and assures that the desired outcomes are being achieved.

At first instance, customer journey maps might look quite simple but as the businesses get into detail, these journey maps become complex and are available in different forms. A customer might get in touch with a brand through one channel and end up buying a product via another channel.

A few of the benefits of customer journey mapping are:

  1. Providing brands with the visibility of their entire customer journey.
  2. Helping organizations to focus on a particular customer need at various stages in the buying funnel.
  3. Businesses can intelligently decide the logical order of the customer journey.
  4. Providing an outside perspective to businesses on their sales process.
  5. Analyzing the gaps between the desired customer experience and the actual output received.
  6. Allowing businesses to concentrate their efforts and expenditure on the most critical aspect and to maximize effectiveness.

Customer Experience Goals

Here are 5 essential characteristics of an effective Customer Journey Mapping solution that can help brands revive their customer experience goals:

  1. Data Accuracy: Customer journey mapping crafts the road to superior data quality. Organizations can track millions and billions of interactions with a CJM tool. These interactions help organizations to create and deliver intelligent outcomes. As this data is captured via different sources like email, social media, websites, etc., the information collected can be processed to run different marketing campaigns as per the need of an individual customer. Thus effective CJM software helps organizations in capturing the most legitimate data and insight to create meaningful customer experiences.
  2. Real-time journey mapping: Engaging customers individually by creating different journey maps on a regular basis can help businesses unlock hidden potentials as they are exposed to a huge pool of data on a real-time basis. CJM enables organizations to picture every single step in the buyer’s journey from bucketing individuals to different personas, mapping touchpoints, setting goals, analyzing sentiments to delivering relevant outcomes and insights.
  3. Integrations with 3rd party systems: Running a standalone setup without integrations to third-party systems like customer communication management system and CRM that maintains the record of the entire customer journey can be a tough task for organizations. Thus, the CJM tool should be flexible enough to quickly adapt to the integrations and at the same time should be focused on digitalizing the entire Customer journey with the help of other platforms.
  4. Centralized view of the journey: Organizations should be able to view their entire customer journey on a single platform. A customer can get in touch with a brand through various channels like email, website, social media, etc. Thus, it often becomes difficult for organizations to tap each and every interaction. With an agile CJM tool, organizations can have a centralized view of their entire customer journey which will not only help them in mapping the needs but at the same time will provide them an additive benefit to act proactively.
  5. Future-proof strategies: Organizations should not keep their customer journey mapping goal as a static descriptive model. They should rather focus on innovation and new ways to constantly evolve and update their existing CJM goals with the changing behavior of customers. Thus, the new model formulated will provide organizations with the most suitable way of planning, testing, and implementing the required changes in the customer experience strategy.

CCM In Fulfilling Customer Demands

Are You Building the Right Journey for Your Customers?

The ever-evolving tech advancements and multiple processes have increased customer touchpoints which provides an immense threat to organizations working in a competitive environment. According to McKinsey “the number of touchpoints is increasing in number by around 20% a year.” With more touchpoints come huge complexities in fulfilling customer demands. Therefore, it is advisable for brands to stay updated on their customer journey and map every movement to deliver the experiences that their customers crave.