Customer journey mapping will transform your business - Brilliant Noise

Six ways customer journey mapping will transform your business

By Brilliant Noise, January 2017. Posts
Customer journey mapping creates efficiencies and helps grow revenues by retaining existing customers and acquiring new ones. Transform your business around the customer while driving engagement and commercial growth.A recent report by Forrester explained that:
Companies use journey maps as a catalyst to create customer-centric cultures… journey maps can help at each stage of a culture transformation.
Journey maps create an understanding of the customer and enable a customer-centric thought process. Customer journey maps reveal pain points and key moments in the customer experience and connect these insights to business operations and delivery. This improves internal and external processes and encourages focus and cohesion throughout a company.Customer journey mapping determines how organisations can save costs by creating efficiencies and grow revenues by retaining existing and acquiring new customers.

Customer-focused, data-led journey mapping

We work with major brands to create customer journey maps tailored to a range of business challenges. Often the challenge for larger companies is to improve how different channels speak to each other across the multiple touchpoints for customers.Mapping brings teams together to understand their roles in the customer journey, it identifies weak spots and where to focus improvement for the biggest impact, and informs customer-led reporting and analytics.Our unique approach to customer-focused, data-led journey mapping transforms businesses internally while improving the customer journey across multiple touchpoints.

Six key business benefits

Drive growth by investing in customer experience Mapping customer journeys is an integral part of being a customer-first business. The insights deliver value across the whole customer journey and lifecycle whilst making it possible to measure the value of each customer touchpoint. Combining customer data with a map of touchpoints results in clear insight as opposed to an overwhelming amount of data and no clear path of action.Drives operational efficiency59% of customer experience professionals said that insufficient collaboration across silos damages their company’s customer experience. Customer journey mapping enables you to connect customer touchpoints with internal systems and teams, from here you can align every part of your company around the customer.An effective customer journey map identifies operational gaps, areas for improvement and where you can create efficiencies. This helps to prioritise initiatives and drive operational improvements.Inspire collaboration and culture changeAs we’ve seen, mapping journeys establishes the customer as the organising principle while breaking down silos and bringing teams together to improve the customer experience. From here you’ll be able to establish new connected ways of working across teams.These maps can inspire real change in a company’s culture. Barclays Africa slashed customer complaints by 18% in one year by transforming their customer experience. This was achieved through training and coaching sessions and using journey maps to identify existing and desired customer service behaviours.Support constant improvementThis is not just a one-off exercise, but informs a long-term, sustainable improvement programme. Our customer journey maps act as diagnostic dashboards which should be constantly updated to reflect customer behaviours.Forrester have found that current-state customer journey maps allow organisations to focus on “finding and fixing problems in today’s journeys” whilst the creation of future-state journey maps “help companies unlock new upstream and downstream services, create new offerings, and envision the future”. This allows a focus on exploration, prototyping, testing and constant improvement.Improve your marketing communications Customer journey mapping highlights opportunities to improve marketing communications at all stages of the customer decision journey. Ensuring your communications reach the right customer, at the right time, in the right place is crucial to a seamless customer experience and efficient content operations.Support smart investmentAn effective customer journey map will provide the data to inform smart decision making and build the business case for future investment.Forrester advises customer experience leaders to make the business case for journey mapping by approaching “decision-makers with authority, logic, and emotion. Journey maps combined with analytics allow CX professionals to articulate clear return-on-investment arguments and incorporate storytelling techniques that help stakeholders feel empathy for what customers go through“.

Customer journey mapping event featuring The Economist

To find out more about how other leading brands use customer journey mapping to improve customer experience and deliver against business objectives read our article How customer journey mapping drives growth, which includes notes from our event featuring Iain Noakes, chief customer journey officer at The Economist.To talk to us about your customer experience challenges.