What are the benefits?
No matter how great your communications have been or how good your frontline staff are, if your administrative systems don't work properly, your most junior staff are rude or apathetic or your building is dirty or messy, then your organisation's relationship with your customers or the general public can suffer.
Customer journey mapping is all about ironing out these inconsistencies. It enables you to consistently and predictably manage customer behaviour.
Customer journey mapping helps you to:
- deal with your customers more effectively
- retain customers
- increase efficiency
- minimise negative customer experiences
- deliver a consistently good service to your customer, in all circumstances.
It can be used at different stages in the strategic communications and marketing process, and it is important to decide in advance how you want to use the information generated, as this will help you to decide the scope of the mapping. For example, you can use a journey map to scope the broad behaviours of an audience and make a business case for the role of communications. Or you can focus in on a specific audience segment and look at a specific interaction, such as navigating a few pages on a website, in much more detail.
Fortune magazine says that 85 per cent of dissatisfied customers tell 10 people about their experience, delighted customers tell eight people, and satisfied ones tell five.