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5 Recommendations on Building Customer Journey Maps
Chris Theriault
eBook by
Senior Visualizer Business Consultant
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Who We Are . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Recommendation #1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Recommendation #2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Recommendation #3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Recommendation #4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Recommendation #5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Find Customer Interaction Points Faster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
CONTENTS
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WHO WE ARE
About the Author About Aria Solutions
Aria Solutions is a leading provider of contact center and customer engagement solutions, delivering innovative, multi-channel, cloud, on-premises and hybrid-based solutions. Since 1996, Aria has been partnering with Genesys and executing complete Genesys contact center solutions that include: strategic consulting, professional services, system support, managed services and products.
Many top Fortune 1,000 companies and over 500,000 agents have benefited from Aria’s software and service solutions and, as a result, built new or transformed their existing contact centers into Customer Engagement Centers.
Company Specialization
Aria Solutions specializes in delivering custom and advanced solutions for mid-size and large contact centers. Their solutions are configurable, allow for a fast and a lower cost deployment, and serve as a solid foundation that is expandable to their clients’ unique requirements.
Aria’s specialties include: a business and support analytics application to visualize interaction data; an easy-to-use, multi-channel, web-based softphone for Genesys that integrates with Salesforce, MS CRM, and other IT systems; WFM integrations; as well as outbound, cloud, routing and reporting solutions.
Since 2004, Chris has been helping Aria Solutions’ clients with systems analysis, design, integration, technical support of Contact Center technologies, information systems and telecommunications.
Chris believes in great customer service received in a timely and effective manner through the preferred media channel. Therefore, he puts his effort into providing solutions to today’s ever evolving contact center to meet enterprise service needs and invite customers in via all media channels.
He holds an Honours Bachelor of Science Degree, specializing in Physical Sciences from University of Toronto; as well as a Diploma of Electronics Engineering Technology with a focus on Telecommunications from Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology.
Chris TheriaultSenior Visualizer Business Consultant at Aria Solutions
“Aria employs 50+ contact center experts who have a thorough methodology, knowledge and experience to help contact centers promote customer engagements, create exceptional customer experiences, and deliver positive business results.”
Rob Church - CEO at Aria Solutions
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IntroductionWhat are Customer Journey Maps?
As companies compete for market leadership position, it is quite easy for them to focus internally - either on processes to improve efficiency in delivery of their product, or on research and development to remain competitive. This can distract from understanding the market for which they are competing. Understanding how the market views, interacts and deals with their company is equally important.
Customer Journey Maps are an effective tool for companies to document the customer perspective and identify key interaction points to monitor, measure and improve upon the entire customer experience. In order to say the journey is a great one, customers should want to repeat and share their experience via their own social network.
A customer journey map takes many forms, but typically appears as some type of infographic - see an example of the Customer Journey map below. Whatever its form, the goal is the same: to teach organizations more about their customers’ experience when interacting with the company. The more touchpoints you have, the more complicated it becomes.
What are the benefits of Customer Journey Maps?
Organizations that are able to skillfully manage the entire experience reap enormous rewards, such as:
• Enhanced customer satisfaction• Reduced customer churn• Increased revenue• Greater employee satisfaction
Companies also discover more effective ways to collaborate across functions and levels - a process that delivers gains throughout the company.
The process for creating Customer Journey Maps can be an arduous one but the end result (if done correctly) can be a critical tool for helping all facets of the company understand how the company interacts with its clients and how the company is perceived in the market.
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RECOMMENDATION #1
Don’t rely on generic client demographic data, instead determine the segmentation of your customer base
Often, decisions are made on general assumptions about customer behavioural traits that aren’t always true. Most companies don’t regularly gather customer perspectives or broadly share the insights when they do. But without an outside view on what is and isn’t important, and what does and doesn’t work, your journey map will lack an accurate view of the customer, causing your employees to make decisions based on incomplete or flawed information.
An example of this comes from the print media industry. The general expectation is that the older the customer is, the less likely they will be to use alternative communication channels, such as chat, social media or SMS when communicating with the company.
However, a large number of their interactions come from a more senior population who own multiple properties and migrate between them throughout the year. They offer a change of address service for their home deliveries. These senior clients are largely migratory and do not own a land line. Instead, they perform their interactions from a mobile device and are proficient in the use of alternative media channels.
HOW?
• Do not exclude external sources of research. The goal is to find an appropriate balance between high level demographic based research and result data from an existing customer base (i.e. surveys).
• Proficiency is developed with the use of alternative media channels. Make sure to use the right information pertaining to your clientele and not generalizations applied to the masses.
• The value and goal of the Customer Journey Map is to provide the customer perspective to which internal resources may be blind. Some companies bring in customers and build them interactively with internal staff. Ethnographies can create a very powerful experience, although the small sample size can create bias. Better to do the research first, and then bring in your customers to build your final map.
• Be sure to also include Customers and Non-Customers. A pre-sales customer journey map should always include non-customers, as they may follow a different path to make a decision. Non-customers may value a compelling pre-sales event that greatly differs from your existing client base, which would become a critical offering for increased sales.
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RECOMMENDATION #2
Avoid analysis paralysis
Given the breadth of data customer research can surface, it’s easy to attempt including lots of it. This quickly descends into dizzying complexity. Remember that a customer journey map is a tool to help you easily understand customers and their needs. The core message can get lost in the details.
HOW?
• Clearly identify your customer, and include what’s most important to them, as they pursue their goals.
• Break the experience into phases. In a longer experience, customers are accomplishing different things at different times. For example, early purchase phases typically involve trying to figure out what questions to ask, whereas later phases are more transactional. By understanding the customer’s mindset at each phase, you can customize the experience around the specific needs of each phase.
• Choose to create customer journeys that represent the largest customer interaction segments. Focus and achieve consensus to move forward with design, measurement and optimization. As with any collaborative process, define a decision structure with the right levels of empowerment. The goal is not to make everyone happy, but to find the best and most efficient solutions to satisfy and identify customer experience.
• Beginning with the end in mind will define the path for getting there. So, know what you want and keep your strategic goals in the forefront to guide you in your employment of journey maps.
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RECOMMENDATION #3
View it as a living iterative process
What may be true today may not be true tomorrow.
Customer habits can change quickly in the new social world and need to be reviewed regularly, so that new habits can be addressed and the company is able to react effectively to that change.
HOW?
• Invest in the right level of effort to maintain a customer journey map that addresses the current and evolving needs of the customer base.
• Schedule recurring revisions and build the appropriate team to repeat this iteration.
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RECOMMENDATION #4
Establish key interaction points
A customer journey map helps to identify gaps - points in the customer experience that are disjointed or painful.
These might be:
• Gaps between information channels when users receive mixed messaging across various channels
• Gaps between departments where users get frustrated with internal communication issues
Great journey maps separate critical moments of truth from the rest. For example, when visiting a hospital, a bad check-in taints the rest of the patient experience.
HOW?
• Identify points of bottleneck and points where lacks of efficiency or acceptable service levels exist.
• Identify journey events of great impact that have a greater bearing on the customer’s perspective regarding successful interactions with you company.
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RECOMMENDATION #5
Measure value at key interaction points
Contact Centers are a collection of complex software processes that generate a tremendous amount of interaction data. Most contact centers rely on traditional analysis processes, such as manual data gathering, text editors and generic log analysis tools in an attempt to understand the data and the customer experience.
Simply identifying those key customer touch points is not enough. You must then set up your environment to correctly measure and track outcomes around those key interactions.
Customer communities, Social CRM, and social supply chains will let us tap into the amazing power of the crowd to resolve problems and drive mass participation towards shared outcomes and providing keen insight to the market as it stands in real time.
Social Media integrated business tools will create open customer journeys. Social media at long last lets us see what’s really happening, when it’s happening and respond to the market in a timely fashion that will let us get ahead of our competition.
An entire industry of services and infrastructure for making this happen has already sprouted up, but first, we must update our business processes to use this information to optimize our work.
HOW?
Your organization needs a centralized system that breaks down the silos of measurement, minimizes the need for multiple tools, establishes a common set of measurements, and offers a holistic view of all interactions.
The right application must have the ability to:
• Capture all events around all customer interactions and then easily perform analysis on or query that data• Provide a near real-time visibility to trends and issues• Give you the ability to anticipate trouble in the key interaction areas• Allow you to drill down quickly and to have visibility from cradle to grave of the entire interaction
experience
Investigating a customer experience from cradle to grave with traditional tools requires intensive manual efforts and consolidation of data form various systems. Streamlining tools, such as CIMplicityTM Visualizer, captures as much of the experience as possible, by reducing analysis and maintenance overhead.
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Find Customer Interaction Points Faster
Interaction data analytics applications are key in identifying customer journey interaction points
Traditional methods for locating relevent customer data require sifting through an endless array of data and log files. A picture is worth a thousand words, so when trying to identify your customer patterns and trends - data visualization applications play a huge rule in speeding up this process.
Data visualization through CIMplicity Visualizer is more than just pie charts and pretty pictures. Visualizer’s easy drill-down functionality allows business analysts to accurately measure and track key interaction points of the customer journey and overall activity related to the contact center in a fraction of the time.
Clear data and definitive answers build confidence in the system and give the organization the ability to effectively manage every customer experience.
CIMplicityTM Visualizer is a support and business analytics application that provides data visualization and consolidation of the Genesys customer interaction events in a clearly displayed visual interface.
This application allows searching for and proactively analyzing massive amounts of data in minutes to find problems and identify customer trends.
LEARNMORE
For more information, visit www.ariasolutions.comFollow on Twitter @AriaSolutions
Head Office (Canada)
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Corporate Office (US)
825 Market St. Building M, Suite 250Allen, TX 75013Toll-free: 1-866-550-ARIA (2742)
Copyright © 2015 Aria Solutions Inc.
The information contained herein is proprietary to Aria Solutions Inc. No part of this eBook may be reproduced in any written, electronic, recording, or photocopying without written permission of Aria Solutions Inc. The exception would be in the case of brief quotations embodied in the critical articles or reviews and pages where permission is specifically granted by the publisher or author.
Although every precaution has been taken to verify the accuracy of the information contained herein, the author and publisher assume no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for damages that may result from the use of information contained within.
