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Customer journey mapping is the term for creating visual representations of customers’ interactions with your organisation, as well as their needs and processes. It is used to gather insights into your existing customer journey, devise optimisations, locate bottlenecks and opportunities, and identify areas where you can introduce innovations. In this article, we shall explain this in more detail. We invite you to read on.
Table of Contents
- What Is Customer Journey Mapping?
- The Impact of Customer Journey Mapping
- Customer Journey Mapping is Based on Data
- The Takeaway
What Is Customer Journey Mapping?
Customer journey mapping is the process of creating customer journey maps: visual representations of all the touchpoints that a customer may have with your organisation, where the customer’s needs and expectations are included.
Why should you create customer journey maps? Mainly because they give you insights on what your customers think. Hence, they are essential for improving customer experience. However, to do so, you shouldn’t focus purely on the interactions but on the your customer’s feelings on each step of their journey.
We also need to mention UX journey mapping here – a term that may but doesn’t have to be interchangeable with customer journey mapping. The former refers to creating maps focused on the customer’s experiences through their journey and may include other elements like touchpoints and processes that you’ll find in standard customer journey maps.
Do you want to enhance your customer experience with your app or internet banking platform? At Ailleron we offer you our experience and knowledge in the form of UX and UI design services for banking.
The Impact of Customer Journey Mapping
We’ve already mentioned that customer journey mapping helps you improve customer experience, but that was pretty general. Therefore, now we shall examine this more deeply. What is the impact of this approach, and how can you benefit from it? Here are some examples.
Training Your Team
The first benefit of customer journey mapping is that it enables you to better prepare your team for their interactions with the customers. By understanding what emotions your customers feel at each step of their journey, you can prepare your customer service agents to deliver more personalised customer experiences and adhere to these feelings.
The results? Customers will be more satisfied with your financial services and feel that their expectations are met.
Locating and Eliminating Bottlenecks
Every process might have bottlenecks that make it more difficult to deliver exceptional customer experiences or to complete it in a timely manner. Customer journey mapping can help you locate such bottlenecks – either directly or by knowing where to look for them.
- Direct approach – Sometimes, just mapping out the customer journey may show you that certain steps aren’t functioning as they should.
- Indirect approach – By juxtaposing your customer journey data with a map, you can locate particular underperforming steps of the journey. Then, you may delve deeper into them to find out what doesn’t work and fix it.
Discovering the Impact and Potential for Optimisations
Another key advantage of customer journey mapping is that it enables you to examine the impact of each step in your customers’ journeys on them. This way, you can discover which processes should be optimised first to achieve the highest possible cost-effectiveness or to introduce the most meaningful changes under a limited budget.
Introducing Innovations
Finally, customer journey mapping helps organisations locate the places best suited for innovative solutions, even if those solutions would change the process significantly.
Take, for instance, customer onboarding in banking. This is one of the most critical steps of the customer journey, especially since it’s commonly abandoned. With a customer journey map, you can understand the feelings, get a clear picture of the whole process and decide on implementing a new solution that will enhance this process. The result? You know you should invest in an eKYC-compliant digital customer onboarding solution.
Customer Journey Mapping is Based on Data
So, how do you reap the benefits of customer journey mapping? Before creating the first visual representations, you need to collect relevant data that will serve as the basis for your maps. This, on the other hand, requires a set of efforts or even IT solutions.
Firstly, you need solicited data – information gathered from your clients. To do so, you’ll need to conduct customer interviews or surveys and generally collect feedback. Here, the key is finding the right time window to ask your clients for their opinions – you can learn more in our article on how to measure customer satisfaction in financial institutions.
Secondly, you need to gather unsolicited data. This requires proper systems in place that collect the right information while removing irrelevant ones that could cause noise. Purchase history, transactional data, time spent in your mobile banking app or a call centre queue – all of these are valuable sources of information for your customer journey maps.
Here, what matters is the way you collect and store your customer information. If your data is siloed or mislabelled, you will struggle to come up with the right conclusions based on it. Therefore, you should introduce proper customer categorisation (it will help you create customer personas), integrate your data into a single source of truth and ensure that it’s cleansed – it has only relevant information.
Are you looking for an efficient way to collect, integrate and store customer data? See our customer data platform development services for banking – we will help you make the most of your data!
The Takeaway
Customer journey mapping requires a lot of information and considerable effort, especially when direct customer feedback is concerned. However, it is an effective way to improve your customer journeys, hence delivering better customer experiences and driving satisfaction and loyalty among your clients. Moreover, you will need to organise your information flow to make better data-driven decisions anyway; therefore, we recommend doing so as soon as possible to gain the power of AI-driven insights and benefit from the clear customer journey visualisation in the form of detailed maps.
You might also be interested in: What is Business Process Management (BPM)?
