Customer journey mapping helps you understand the emotions that motivate your customers’ actions during each stage of their experience with your business. This useful tool, the cornerstone of any effective customer experience program, shows where you’re delighting customers, where you’re frustrating them, where you’re losing them, and much more.
By doing so, journey maps reveal the most cost-effective opportunities to improve the journey, reduce churn, and increase customer loyalty. Putting your customers at the center of your decision-making allows you to reap dramatic rewards that directly impact ROI.
To prepare for our upcoming Customer Journey Mapping Workshop in February in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, I spoke to past workshop participants and now certified journey mappers to reflect on their most important learnings, now that they are six months in. Here is what they said: Read more
Two-thirds of customer journey mapping initiatives fail to drive action, as we revealed in our book How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer? Using Journey Mapping to Drive Customer-Focused Change.
That’s not really surprising, is it? It’s easier to reveal where customers are having problems than it is to do something about it. Taking effective action requires getting your silos aligned to improve the customer experience. A new class of software can help. Read more
Successful customer journey maps drive customer-focused change like improving customer experience, developing a new way to deliver value to customers, or reducing the cost to serve current customers.
Based on a 2016 study of customer experience professionals, over two-thirds of respondents did not rate their journey mapping project as successful. The reason? A lack of action from the mapping endeavor.
When we work with clients at Heart of the Customer, our goal is to drive action from the journey maps. We require our clients to work through the Five Questions as a foundation for their journey mapping. Ask yourself and your team to work through these Five Questions before launching your customer journey mapping initiative: Read more
I go to a lot of Customer Experience (CX) events. Although I learn a lot of new things, I also hear some common concerns throughout all of them. No matter the venue, you can be certain that somebody in the audience will ask a presenter, “How can I get executives to care about customers?”
T
hat’s the wrong question. Believe it or not, your executives actually do care about your customers. These are smart people, and they know that pleasing customers is the secret to success.
They simply don’t care about your so-called “customer experience” program. Read more
The Heart of the Customer blog is a place where we share our insights on journey mapping, offer best practices based on our experiences, and share CX practitioner interviews – and we don’t normally place promotional items here. We are making an exception this week; as Jim Tincher and I prepare to release our journey mapping book this month, we want to get the word out about a new Heart of the Customer offering: a two-day, hands-on journey mapping workshop that will provide all you need to map journeys that drive action in your own organization.
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This post, written by Heart of the Customer B2B Practice Lead Nicole Newton, is the third in a week-long series about some of the ways journey mapping differs from traditional market research. Guest authors Corey Pawlak, Cathy McLane and Nicole Newton will share their expertise in recruiting and interviewing B2B customers, why 10-page reports are better than 50-page reports, and using video to bring the customer experience to life.
As a long-time marketing research practitioner, I am focused on gathering the most accurate data to answer the problem being researched. Why are sales lower than anticipated? Why is our customer retention rate lower than projected for certain product lines? What can we do to make it easier for customers to work with us?
This post, written by Heart of the Customer Project Manager Cathy McLane, is the second in a week-long series about some of the ways journey mapping differs from traditional market research. Guest authors Corey Pawlak, Cathy McLane and Nicole Newton will share their expertise in recruiting and interviewing B2B customers, why 10-page reports are better than 50-page reports, and using video to bring the customer experience to life.
As a strategic communications advisor and program manager, I’ve seen my share of customer insights reports. They’ve ranged from 50 pages with data tables on every page to succinct PowerPoint presentations that have cool animations but very few actionable insights.
We find a lot of confusion in the marketplace around journey mapping. Some think that journey mapping is just a workshop where you take all the people who created your broken, siloed experience, give them Post-It Notes, and Bam! You have a journey map. Others go the opposite direction, considering journey mapping to be traditional market research with a nice-looking report. It’s this latter group that we’re focusing on this week in a series of posts about what exactly is different between traditional market research and best-practice journey mapping. Read more
We’re celebrating Mapping Month in a big way, and I hope you can join us. We’ll have events both in-person and online, to share the journey mapping best practices outlined in our book, How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer? Using Journey Mapping to Drive Customer-Focused Change.
Not Making CX Progress? Start Saying NoAugust 14, 2020 - 6:00 am
To Spur Action, Create a Sense of UrgencyAugust 6, 2020 - 6:00 am
CX Needs Change ManagementJuly 31, 2020 - 9:16 am
Experiences Designed for Everybody Satisfy NobodyJuly 22, 2020 - 6:00 am
Chase Business Results, Not Survey ScoresJuly 15, 2020 - 3:06 pm