Delivering a great customer experience is not that difficult for a small shopkeeper who doesn’t have any employees. It’s all about knowing the products, understanding the customers and doing the right thing for them. When it comes to larger business with multiple employees or, worse, multiple branches or locations, things can get messy.
Doing the right the thing for the customer gets more complicated, and the challenge becomes keeping it up on a consistent basis.
A company can only win lifelong customers by nailing that “moment of truth” experience that they’re aiming for, every single time. It’s hard to do, and there will always be unsatisfied customers.
The problem is that most companies don’t even measure customer satisfaction on a consistent basis, or even bother to train their employees how to deliver the expected customer experience.
In order to really differentiate themselves, companies should take into account all their customer experience issues, and then rework the whole customer journey. It is only by properly monitoring customer experience, and using the input to properly train your employees, that you will be able to differentiate yourself from your competition in terms of customer experience and customer satisfaction.
Unless you use surveys and act on customer insights (feedback), there is no way you can create amazing customer experiences on a consistent basis.
After doing everything in your power to measure customer experience, it’s time to use all the customer feedback you have collected to improve the accuracy of your customer journey map.
Customer journey maps document every interaction your customers have with your brand, from seeing one of your advertisements to returning home with the products they just purchased at your store. Because they are so exhaustive, customer journey maps are very useful in identifying the unique experience that your customers have (or don’t have) with your brand.
You can use journey maps to effectively predict upcoming customer experiences, to determine whether you need to change your business altogether, to determine and take care of current customer interaction problems, to encourage organization-wide employee communication, and to assign leadership roles for key customer processes and interactions after identifying crucial touchpoints.
In short, journey mapping can help you tailor your business activities to your customers’ needs.