Customer Journey Maps

Customer Touchpoints and Journey Maps

If you dig deep enough, you'll discover that most businesses have gaps and misalignments within and between their customer touchpoints. This article aims to help you find out, manage, and better integrate your customer touchpoints across your operations.

What are customer touchpoints?

SurveyMonkey identifies a customer touchpoint as “any time a potential customer or customer comes in contact with your brand - before, during, or after they purchase something from you.” While Salesforce suggests that “[customer] touchpoints are the windows of interaction between an individual buyer and your business.” 

Touchpoints can either validate your brand promise or contradict it. When touchpoints validate your brand promise, they can, according to Ron Shevlin (Analyst, Aite Group LLC), “strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical investment a customer has in [your] brand” (Patterson, 2018). 

Laura Patterson, from MarketingProfs and owner of VisionEdge, notes that as customers interact with your organization, these touchpoints influence their “perception of your products, service, or brand.”

Touchpoints can be intentional or unintentional. They begin when customers become aware of your brand “long before they make a purchase and long after they’ve had their first transaction” (Patterson, 2018).

To bring touchpoints into perspective, organizations are developing customer journey maps.

What are customer journey maps?

A customer journey map becomes “a visual representation of every experience your customers have with you” (Salesforce UK, 2016). Like myths, customer journey maps are not authentic customer experiences but an aggregate of many customer experiences combined into a perspective. 

Paul Boag of boagworld.com suggests that the customer journey map encourages businesses to consider the impact of their operations and how their customers perceive them over time rather than as individual transactional snapshots. In addition, the maps allow firms to step back and take a higher view of how customers interact with their entire organization and across all departments. Think of it as “a story designed to provide insights into the customer’s journey… [it’s] an archetype representing the underlying complexity of the real journey”.

From this vantage point, businesses can gain insights into customer pain points that build up through multiple touchpoints and are not readily evident during individual transactions (Salesforce UK, 2016). Gaps that cause friction or make your service appear disjointed become the seeds of bad experiences that customers begin to relate to your brand (Boag, 2019). Intentional or not, these perceptions can become your brand's new identity. It’s essential to weed out unintended perceptions by contrasting them against your intended brand promise and then strategically resolving them.

According to Salesforce UK, “customers can come into contact with your business in a multitude of ways and from many different starting points,” and they expect to be able to transition across these touchpoints seamlessly, requiring companies to remember “who they are and what they’re looking for.” 

McKinsey’s research found that “...when consumers embarked on journeys that involved multiple channels, their experience was materially worse than during single-channel experiences.” Combine this with an explosion of digital transactions, and you can see why customer journey maps “can no longer be represented in a linear journey from A to B [because] buyers often take a back and forth, cyclical, multi-channel journey” (Agius, 2020). 

Individual transactions don’t win customers over. They judge companies based on the whole experience. “[They] want to move seamlessly between various digital and offline touchpoints, often browsing on one in the morning only to close the deal on another in the evening” (Salesforce Research). Consumers seek a personal relationship reflecting past purchases, favoured products, and other characteristics they expect digitally-enabled enterprises to manage.

Companies dealing with many “brand channels” often struggle to prioritize where to invest. Companies must constantly balance the need to include many journey scenarios to try and capture a complete picture while knowing that it is paramount to synthesize interactions to keep their maps digestible.

McKinsey’s Nicolas Maechler et al. summarize the following benefits of developing customer journey maps:

• Helping you see where customers interact with your business

• Focusing the business on particular customer needs at different stages in the buying funnel

• Identifying whether the customer journey is in a logical order

• Giving an outside perspective on your sales process

• Showing the gaps between the desired customer experience and the one received

• Highlighting development priorities

• Allowing you to concentrate efforts and expenditures on what matters most to maximize effectiveness

So, how are companies faring?

According to McKinsey, “Only when they took a broader end-to-end view did it become apparent that even though each link in the service-delivery chain appeared healthy, the cumulative effect was quite the opposite... Whether because of poorly aligned incentives, management inattention, or simply human nature, the functional groups that manage these touchpoints are constantly at risk of losing sight of what the customer sees (and wants)—even as the groups work hard to optimize their contributions to the customer experience.” 

Developing customer journey maps within larger organizations becomes exponentially more difficult. The challenge becomes an effort “to coordinate all the departments to be as customer-focused as your customer service, support, and success teams” (Agius, 2020); this requires the focused efforts of senior leaders. However, “[the] more senior you are, the less you have to do with customers [- yet] the more your decisions impact their experience” (Boag, 2019). 

According to McKinsey, most executives “readily grasp the journey concept but wonder whether perfecting journeys pays off in hard-dollar outcomes.” That said, the chart below, developed by McKinsey, notes that “the three journeys that matter most to customers account for more than 25 percent of total customer satisfaction,” which, as the chart indicates, correlates with increased revenue growth.

McKinsey’s research found that the companies that provide customers “with the best experience from start to finish along the journey can expect to enhance customer satisfaction, improve sales and retention, reduce end-to-end service costs, and strengthen employee satisfaction.” 

However, “organizations that fail to… shape the customer’s view of the business can prompt a downpour of negative consequences, from customer defection and dramatically higher call volumes to lost sales and lower employee morale.”

According to McKinsey, there’s also a correlation between better performance on journeys and faster revenue growth. They have calculated that “in measurements of customer satisfaction with the firms’ most important journeys, a one-point improvement on a ten-point scale corresponds to at least a three-percentage-point increase in the revenue growth rate.”

When companies invested in more fulsome journeys rather than just touchpoints, their benefits increased substantially, as noted by McKinsey (see diagram below). “Companies that perform best on journeys have a more distinct competitive advantage than those that excel at touchpoints; ...the gap on customer satisfaction between the top-and bottom-quartile companies on journey performance was 50 percent wider than the gap between the top-and bottom-quartile companies on touchpoint performance.”

Using workshops to uncover customer journeys

Workshops are one of the more effective ways to access feedback from your teams. They can help identify the layers ingrained within touchpoints and indicate the context in which they occur, both of which can help develop your customer journey map. 

Your workshop teams should include key representatives (a frontline worker and an influencer, typically, a senior executive) from the departments identified as accountable throughout the customer journey's elements (or portions). That's one of the critical advantages of staffing workshops accordingly, "it will focus critical influencers from across the organization on the importance of user experience. It educates them so that they better understand how to serve their customers" (Boag, 2019).

Next, according to Laura Patterson of MarketingProfs, the teams should inventory all of the “touchpoints your customers encounter throughout their entire life cycle.” Use the pain points to help name the journey scenarios; this will focus the teams squarely on customer-specific desires. A customer journey map is often a collection of many unique journey scenarios, all driven by root causes or pains that your potential or existing customers are trying to resolve. 

When inventorying the touchpoints, Laura Patterson recommends building an Excel spreadsheet to capture the following:

1. Touchpoint name

2. Operational purpose

3. Role in customer experience

4. Lifecycle stage

5. Touchpoint owner

6. Importance/impact

7. Operational effectiveness

8. Customer experience effectiveness

Paul Boag of boagworld.com, recommends noting the context of “the principal stages a customer passes through in their interaction with your company”, such as:

• Discovery.

• Research.

• Purchase.

• Delivery.

• After-sales.

During the workshop, Aaron Agius from HubSpot recommends using post-it notes on the boardroom wall to help participants capture comments and third-party stories and to visualize the map.

Paul Boag warns that “[one] of the hardest parts of running a customer journey mapping workshop is deciding what to map. In particular, you have to decide what level of detail you want to focus on.” He recommends using the following questions to help the teams identify: tasks, questions, additional touchpoints, emotions, weaknesses, and influences.

• What is the user trying to achieve at this stage?

• What does the user want to know at this stage?

• How does the user interact with the organization at this point?

• What is the user feeling at this stage in the process?

• How does the organization let the user down at this stage?

• Who or what is helping to shape the user’s decision-making process at this stage?

To help prime the workshops with research, Paul Boag recommends digging into the following:

• SocialMention tracks of your brand, regardless of whether those mentions are positive or negative

• Search data to provide valuable insights into what users are looking for

• Surveys to help build background detail with qualitative data such as emotions, feelings and motivations

Paul Boag recommends that “[whatever] its form, the map should contain both statistical and anecdotal evidence. It should highlight users’ needs, questions and feelings throughout their interaction with the organization.” In its completion, he recommends having a designer produce a visual version of the customer journey map “to ensure it is as understandable as possible and grabs people’s attention.” He suggests thinking of “the customer journey map as a poster pinned to the office wall. At a glance, people should be able to see the critical touchpoints that a user encounters. It should remind them that the customer’s needs must always be at the forefront of their thinking.”

Concluding thoughts

McKinsey recommends the following critical actions to consider when managing customer-experience journeys:

1. Step back and identify the nature of the journeys customers take—from the customer’s point of view.

2. Understand how customers navigate across the touchpoints as they move through the journey.

3. Anticipate the customer’s needs, expectations, and desires during each part of the journey.

4. Build an understanding of what is working and what is not.

5. Set priorities for the most important gaps and opportunities to improve the journey.

6. Come to grips with fixing root-cause issues and redesigning the journeys for a better end-to-end experience.

Salesforce encourages companies to refrain from considering customer service as “just a reactionary cost center” instead of treating it as “a core element of differentiated customer experience.”

For most companies, McKinsey warns that “combining operational, marketing and customer, and competitive-research data to understand journeys… can be a long process—sometimes lasting several months.” 

In most cases, “companies ...are wired to maximize productivity and scale economies through functional units - for transactions, not journeys. But the reward is well worth it.” However, this will “require an operational and cultural shift …[and] engages the organization across functions and from top to bottom (Maechler, Neher, and Park, 2016).”

References

Across All Customer Touch Points, Companies Face a New Connected Mandate. Salesforce Research. Retrieved from https://www.salesforce.com/research/customer-touch-points/

Agius, A. (2020, February 6). How to Create an Effective Customer Journey Map. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-journey-map

Boag, P. (2019, March 5). What Is Customer Journey Mapping and How to Start? Retrieved from https://boagworld.com/audio/customer-journey-mapping/

Fontanella, C. (2020, February 6). 20 Customer Touchpoints That Will Optimize Your Customer Journey. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-touchpoints

How to identify your customer touchpoints. SurveyMonkey. Retrieved from https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/identify-customer-touchpoints/

Maechler, N., Neher, K., and Park. R. (2016, March). From touchpoints to journeys: Seeing the world as customers do. McKinsey & Company. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/from-touchpoints-to-journeys-seeing-the-world-as-customers-do

Patterson, L. (2018, May 21). How to Measure Touchpoint Effectiveness: Six Steps to Better Customer Experiences. Retrieved from https://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2018/34787/how-to-measure-touchpoint-effectiveness-six-steps-to-better-customer-experiences

Salesforce UK. (2016, March 23). What is Customer Journey Mapping & Why is it Important? Retrieved from https://www.salesforce.com/uk/blog/2016/03/customer-journey-mapping-explained.html

Strativity can help you move from visualization to enterprise action. Retrieved from https://touchpointdashboard.com/

UXPRESSIA. Create Professional Customer Journey Maps. Retrieved from https://uxpressia.com/