By Vic Bageria, CEO and CVO at Sàvant Data System

Creating an accurate customer journey blueprint can serve as a powerful tool for businesses to understand their customers better and enhance their experience. A customer journey is not as abstract as one may think of it to be. It is, in fact, well thought out and well planned according to how the enterprise wants to position itself. It describes the story of an individual’s experience from his initial interaction, through the process of his engagements developing into a long-term relationship post-transaction.

As a tool, the customer journey blueprint helps the business identify key touch points that ultimately offers a better customer experience.

Unfortunately, various companies infiltrate on customer journey mapping without understanding and getting a clear picture of how they will implement the touchpoints and once the consumer journey blueprint has been finalized, the customer service team is left wondering what the next step would be.

Therefore, before businesses try to venture aimlessly into the consumer journey, they need to first regulate the primary objective for creating a journey blueprint. Here’s how mapping the customer journey blueprint helps enterprises in different ways:

Improve the current customer experience

With an accurate view of the current state journey map, you can be in an advantageous position to serve your customers much better. Only when you understand the present customer properly will you able to address their future concerns. Here’s how businesses can use a current-state journey map in improving the current consumer experience:

Identifying the pain points and prioritize fixes

Unless you understand the exact needs, wants and complaints of your customers, how will you be able to provide them with satisfactory solutions? It is, therefore, essential to first analyze the current consumer scenario thoroughly and understand the exact pain points that need to be fixed. Once you’ve identified the pain points of your customers, you should start fixing them immediately.

Prioritize your fixes with right solutions. Find it, analyze it, measure possible solution and fix it with the apt one.

Identify opportunities for feedback or measurement

Customer feedback is crucial because nobody can describe the problems better than the consumers themselves. Enterprises should always identify opportunities for taking feedback as much as possible so that they can use all such feedback in a constructive manner by measuring actual performances against it and working on providing better solutions.

Plan content and marketing communications accordingly

Most consumers, current as well as potential, know your enterprise through your communication with them, which is mostly indirect or impersonal. Effective content and marketing strategies play a crucial role in making such communication work in your favor. Therefore, content and marketing solutions need to be planned in accordance with the issues that affect the current market the most. Be transparent to your customer, know that hidden agenda can push your customer away. Market it right and you will have your customers trust and loyalty.

Zero in on the root causes of customer pain

Simply understanding the customer pain points is not enough. Enterprises need to identify the root causes of these paint points and zero in on them so that they can work towards eliminating them completely. When the cause of concern will be resolved, there won’t be any concern left. Most causes are simple issues that have aggravated over time, that can be worked on if identified correctly.

Foresee the future consumer experience

It is important to foresee the future requirements of your consumers so that you are better prepared to cater to them. Analyzing and understanding future trends equips enterprises to handle upcoming issues better. It also helps in grabbing opportunities earlier on and performing better towards them. A future-state journey map is helpful in a lot of ways:

Share the vision for your corporate strategy

Enterprises that understand their future challenges and opportunities better are able to look ahead with a solid corporate strategy and work with a clear vision in mind. A future-state map helps enterprises in planning better and formulating stronger corporate strategies that they can then share with confidence and preparedness.

Plan the rollout of a future product or service

Plans can only be made towards something about which there is a certain amount of clarity. A better understanding of your future customers and the future requirements of your current customers helps in much better planning of your future products and/or services and their consequent rollout.

Identify innovation opportunities

More specific innovation opportunities can be explored when there is a certain amount of clarity about the requirements that need to be fulfilled and the challenges that need to be tackled. A future-state customer map helps enterprises identify innovation opportunities accordingly.

Identify the infrastructure and capabilities required to deliver on your vision

Once you know what you’re moving towards and where you want to reach, it becomes easier to plan how to get there. A better understanding of the requirements of the future give enterprises a fair idea about what they’re up against, which helps them identify the infrastructure and capabilities required to meet the expectations they’re looking to fulfill.

Drive organizational change

Knowing the current as well as future requirements of your customers, you can really change the way things work around your organization in order to tackle them head-on and rise on top. With a current-state journey map, you can:

Align your organization around the customer point-of-view

Customer journey blueprints often act as drivers of organizational change. When there is clarity around your clients, you are able to align the working of your organization better around the customers’ point of view. This helps greatly in reducing issues that arise out of lack of customer understanding.

Help employees and partners develop empathy for customers

Only when you understand someone’s situation better can you empathize with them. Mapping the customer journey blueprint helps your management and employees both in understanding and empathizing with your customers. This results in creating better quality offerings for them and enhancing overall consumer experience in the end. This, in turn, helps employees and partners in discovering their own roles in delivering a remarkable customer experience.