Customer journey mapping is all about visualizing the customer’s journey in a way that helps both the business and the customer. The business owner and all the people inside it will be able to create metrics, touchpoints, and actionable goals or outcomes. This is what the customer journey is made up for. But customer journey has to be innovated to adapt to ever-changing customer behaviour, technology, etc. Here are top ways to Innovate Your Customer Journey Map:
Step One
The first step in how to Innovate Your Customer Journey Map is to take note that you want to put yourself in the customer’s shoes, and in their mind, so that you experience your business as they experience it. Note: this is NOT easy to do because you are so close to your own business from YOUR perspective! However if you get this right, you’ll be able to see your own business as your customer, as best you can.
The reason we want to do this is because our customers see things differently than we do!
For example: you would be able to navigate your website pages and functionality smoothly and easily because you see it so often, and perhaps you even built it yourself!
This makes it difficult for you to know how your customer would navigate it and where their blocks, issues or confusions are.
All touchpoints are important, but they’re not all equal in importance. Some touchpoints carry more weight because customers experience them at critical moments in the journey that can make or break their experience, including whether they become a customer at all!
The smartphone version of your website landing page would be considered an important touchpoint because if it’s poorly designed, many consumers will click straight off it.
Another example is to have an Author Bio on your blog because it’s still important as it creates a sense of authority and responsibility to your content, but it’s not as important as your contact form.
You can mark the relative importance by creating a weighting scale and assigning a number to each touchpoint. A 1-5 or 1-10 scale will work for most businesses.
You must innovate each of these touchpoints as your customer needs and behaviour changes over time.
Step Two: Remove Their Pain Points
Firstly; you’ve got to identify the points where your customers are having a hard time or disengaging from you. Do your very best to remove these pain points or blocks from your customer journey because these are the ones that your customer will remember and potentially react to in a negative way.
Using the weighting scale above for each touchpoint, start ranking the pain points in your customer journey and then attack them one by one. Not all pain points can be completely removed immediately; so work out what you can do right away, and then create a plan to solve all the others over time.
Reducing the pain points is the most obvious approach when looking at a customer journey map. There are some other things you can do, though, that are just as important: what follows are our favorite ones.
Step Three: Raise the Bar and Extend the Touchpoints
Congratulations! Now your customers are generally happy throughout their experience with your service or product.
Don’t stop there: ask yourself what you can do to raise the bar and deliver an even higher or better experience that exceeds their expectations. Aim for 6 stars!
This will help you to forge a better relationship with your customers.
Usually, the customer journey is mapped from the very start of their journey and also around the various interactions with your product or service.
But what if you could have an impact on what happens immediately before and after the touchpoint with the customer?
By considering this and designing it you will be able to create a much more customer-centric and engaging customer journey.
The design of the journey is much about an end to end experiential solution, so extend your start and finish steps by 1-3 steps before and after the touchpoint and look for the available opportunities to shine.
Example: at their core, banks provide you with an account and various methods of payment.
Many banks extend the their service by offering, for example, statistics on your expenses, hints on how to save money, or ways to cap expenditure on particular days of the week and nights out to reduce alcohol intake and wasted expenditure.
Step Four: Cut the Crap
To Innovate Your Customer Journey Map, you should remove any unnecessary steps (wherever you can) required to perform an action. Think about the difference between an apple and a banana: eating an apple requires you to go and grab a knife, and peel the apple – it will take you at least 30 seconds.
With a banana, instead, you can skip the knife and reach the pulp more quickly – just 5 seconds. Try to design services and products that resemble more a banana rather than an apple.
How can you minimize the effort (time, cost, number of steps, reasoning) that your customers need to take in order to enjoy the core of your service or product?
Step Five: End With a Bang
The final touchpoint in your customer journey is likely to be vividly remembered by your customers – make sure it’s memorable. Remember that your customer journey might be relatively short or it could also take a long time, depending on your product or service.
Your goal is to make sure they feel like they had an amazing experience and are a happy, contented, raving fan of yours!
Once you’ve created that, your customer advocacy will be easier and organically bring in more people into your business.
It all starts with stepping into the mind, heart and shoes of your customer, so be sure to start there – you’ll be happy you did!
Feel free to contact us if you need help with your customer journey!
