What if there was one thing that could help you understand the buyers completely? And no- it’s not mind-reading. All you need is customer journey mapping.

The past few years have proved overwhelming for businesses and customers. Given the rapid changes digital transformation has prompted, marketplace patterns and demands have taken a 180-degree turn.

And there’s been one significant casualty: customer experience (CX).

Every marketing campaign is curated to capture prospective buyers, but the bull’s eye is the experience. It’s oftentimes the main selling point.

But the gaps are more vivid than ever before due to digitization.

Digital transformations proved to be both a bane and a boon for businesses. On one hand, these help businesses optimize customer interaction. On the other hand, it’s a means for customers to hold companies accountable.

The cracks in customer experiences are all too visible, and many business leaders are aware of why they exist in the first place.

It’s the lack of customer understanding.

Modelling a solution or a marketing message based on a customer base isn’t complex. It’s the questions that precede it. On what basis is an offering personalized? Are there any prerequisites for a ‘resonating’ message?

Data could help answer these particular types of marketing queries, especially when it comes to understanding or engaging a potential customer.

And technology has granted marketers crucial access to it. Not only has modern tech become an avenue to gauge clean and accurate data, but afforded the means to leverage it smartly.

But most businesses fail to do so successfully. The frequent error they make is misaligning data-powered solutions with customer-focused ones.

This is why customer journey mapping is paramount.

According to HBR, a customer journey map is:

“A diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, a retail experience, a service, or any combination.”

Think about this: The nucleus of marketing is storytelling. Across B2B marketing, stories are propagated through data, but most strategies prioritize alignment with tech infrastructure. It’s the customers who should occupy the front seat, not only as data points but as humans infused with diverse emotions.

A customer-centric approach is more about building confidence that they, the customers, are making the right choice. What do they think as they engage with the brand, partners, employees, and products?

A conventional framework would work through the following components:

• Actions/Behavior: What actions is the customer undertaking to move to the next stage?
• Underlying motivations: Why does the customer care enough to go on to the next step? What emotions are they feeling, and if it’s inclined towards delight or frustration?
• Uncertainties: What prevents the customer from moving on to the next step?
• Obstacles: Do any external factors stand in the way of progressing further – cost or structural process?

The customer journey, however, is not linear.

Owing to digital transformation, customer journeys haven’t retained their linearity. Instead, it’s become unpredictable, non-linear, and complex.

Imagine the difference. One customer goes through extensive research and convincing, while the other jumps directly from awareness to purchase due to a strong recommendation.

To pierce the cacophony of noise, marketers are meeting prospective buyers at multiple touchpoints. They have more opportunities to influence the consumers. And consumers themselves wade through distinct paths as they progress down the multitouch marketing funnel.

No two customer journeys are similar.

But, outlining a “typical” customer journey offers insight into the current interaction points and a potential roadmap. From breaking down organizational silos, the map administers customer-centric communication, from sales to logistics. It’s not just advantageous for marketing but also influences cross-departmental functions.

Modern marketers have drastically come to understand the complexity of the buyer’s journey.

It’s not about what’s on paper but about reading between the lines. Customer journey mapping doesn’t always require a storyboard, but visualizing each stage is a good way to begin.

But customer journey maps have to be comprehensive.

A customer’s journey isn’t merely a business offering a product, and a consumer buys it. It’s way more nuanced and intricate.

Every touchpoint the consumer interacts with, even competitors, impacts how they perceive a brand.

“Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,” says the customer service expert, Daniel Richardson.

And this is quite true- 80% of customers don’t just value the offering but also the experience.

Marketing teams make a severe mistake in understanding the customer- they think the customer fits in a tidy little box. This force-fitting has marred the efficacy of marketing strategies and misconstrued the messaging.

However, through customer journey mapping, effective marketers have outlined a more flexible approach.

Customer journey maps consider that each consumer behavior isn’t confined to just one funnel stage. These behaviors are often overlapping and affect multiple stages.

For a 360-degree customer journey mapping, specific ingredients have to have a central space in the recipe, or it’s insipid. These are:

1. What is the user’s story? The historical and behavioral data will reveal this, so build a user persona for all the accounts.
2. A journey could extend from days to years, so what’s the timeline chosen for this specific map?
3. Highlight the active touchpoints and channels to gauge what the customers are actually doing.
4. Figure out if any external stimuli influence how the customers feel about the brand.
5. Find out how your customers feel and think at every touchpoint and build an empathy map of relevant emotions.
6. Regroup categories and aspects that affect each other and influence customer experience together.
7. Sketch the journey through a timeline, video, or any other diagram style. The point is pinning down the motion of the customers through the journey, irrespective of the canvas.
8. Leverage the journey map. What’s the use of the file remaining on your hard drive? Understand why the mapping was significant in the first place and use it to modify customer experiences.
9. Define relevant KPIs, and as you modify the touchpoints and channels, update the metrics. This will potentially help mark the road for the business’s potential growth.

It’s sort of a story crafted by marketers on where the customers are in their journey. This outlines a ‘day-in-the-life’ approach to customer journey mapping.

It accounts for every little interaction and influence the customers would have felt or had – from their own to stakeholders and employees.

Journey mapping means stepping into the customers’ shoes.

The core purpose behind this tactic is – these maps help modulate the marketing funnel through the customer’s perspective.

Brands understand at what point in the journey customers desire what sort of experience and how. It’s about gauging which specific interaction delights or frustrates them and why.

Spotlighting this starts with leaning towards more customer listening.

As customer needs and patterns constantly evolve, marketing is experimenting with multiple innovative software, especially AI-driven ones. But more than jumping on the AI bandwagon, adapting to customer needs should be given more heed. Many preach, but few have actually incorporated this strategy into their core marketing functions.

Building customer journey maps is the fundamental step. Although tech plays an integral role here, it’s a customer-first and technology-second approach.

It provides a view of the necessary balance between customer situation, intent, and objective, and how it aligns with the organization’s goals.

From a marketer’s perspective, data is a true reflection of this.

It pinpoints where the customers are in the funnel and offers a 360-degree view of their progression.

Even if paired with the most advanced technology, any approach is ineffective unless rooted in customer understanding.

It’s paramount for a compelling CX.

Journey maps are the best methodology to translate marketers’ empathy into a structured and comprehensive design. It’ll not only accommodate users’ needs but also remove as many pain points as possible.

Each brand understands how significant customers are to them. They develop digital and physical communication channels to offer panoramic experiences.

What they are missing out on is, rather than perceiving the customer journey as a whole, looking at it as an amalgamation of atoms (journey points).

Brand awareness is just the beginning of a customer’s journey with your business. How can you create a positive customer experience in the long run?

Whether you are trying to increase your client base or improve brand awareness, customer experience is essential. It attracts the target audience to your company, thus influencing their buying behavior. If you can improve the CX, it can help you establish brand loyalty and create lifetime value.

Customer experience demonstrates the impression customers form about your brand throughout their buyer’s journey. It impacts the brand positioning and overall sales cycle. According to Forbes, 76 percent of business leaders consider customer experience an asset for gaining a competitive advantage. Measuring CX is paramount for strategizing and improving outcomes.

Customer experience analytics offer the following insights:

• The ideal client base for your business and how you can reach potential loyal customers
• Client feedback through surveys, reviews, and more
• An overall report of the customer journey and pain points or roadblocks along the way

Performance and success of current offerings and gaps that require attention

Significance of CX Analytics

You can achieve better CX by implementing strategies to improve customer engagement, purchasing behavior, and lifetime value. Integration of CX analytics allows companies to draw actionable insights that cover every aspect of the business, from sales and marketing to customer retention. With CX, you can evaluate whether you have addressed customer pain points or if there are any gaps. These also help track your interactions with the target customers on the relevant channels.

Let’s dive into the best CX metrics.

The key ways to measure customer experience

CX metrics help you apply numerical scores and touchpoints to analyze buyer’s response. You can visualize the specific parameters with the scores and figures. We have compiled a list of the top 7 metrics for evaluating customer experience with your brand.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS is an indicator of whether your customers like your brand. You can calculate the NPS score by sending your customers a survey with a relevant question, such as how likely are they to refer your brand to others, on a scale of 0-10. The interpretation follows as

• 0-6: detractors
• 7-8: passives
• 9-10: promoters

Customer Effort Score (CES)

This metric determines how much effort your customers invest in interacting with your brand. It provides holistic data on supreme customer experience and what does not work. CES compliments NPS, where a combination of these two offer a quick glimpse into business progress and customer retention.

You can estimate the CES by preparing a survey in a particular format, where the customers are asked to give a score from 1 to 5 or 1-7. Here, 1 represents ‘strongly disagree’ and 5 or 7 refers to ‘strongly agree’. The higher the score, the better. A low score denotes the need to improve certain customer touchpoints. 

Make sure you can access these surveys in real-time, appearing on your brand’s website soon after the customer gives a score. An alternate way to go about it is to email the CES survey to the customer right away.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

It measures the quality and worth of a client for your brand. A customer’s lifetime value enables informed decision-making. These components are required for calculating the CLV: average transaction amount, number of transactions, and length of customer relationship. Once you have these details, multiply the average transaction amount by the number of transactions, followed by multiplying by the retention period. Monitoring CLV takes you closer to better customer retention and effective decisions that accelerate the sales cycle.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

Your sales and marketing teams work diligently towards integrating strategies that amplify customer satisfaction, boosting the sales funnel. CSAT helps with understanding whether the audience is satisfied with your offerings. You can utilize this metric by following every major customer transaction with a CSAT survey, answerable between ‘very dissatisfied’ to ‘very satisfied’. This helps you get an overview of the ability of your offerings to meet the expectations of your customers. For example, you could go for these questions:

• How will you rate your overall satisfaction with our brand?
• How satisfied are you with the offering you recently purchased?
• How satisfied are you with our customer support? 
• Would you recommend our brand to others?

The plus point about CSAT is that it allows you to change the questions based on the insights you seek and the touchpoints you wish to evaluate. 

Customer Churn Rate

This metric provides an idea of the customers who are no longer involved in the business with you. It is also known as the attrition rate— the number of people who stop subscribing to your offerings. The customer churn rate is ideal to have low churn rates consistently, implying that you have a better retention rate. You must monitor your customer churn rate regularly to understand the efficacy of your existing marketing strategies.

You can calculate the customer churn rate by subtracting the number of customers you retain at the end of a cycle from those at the beginning. Divide this figure by the second number and multiply the answer by 100.

Customer Retention Rate

According to 31% of service professionals, a better customer retention rate is a goal of most brands. The CX metric dives into the number of customers a business retains over a certain period and helps to find customer loyalty. However, the downside is the complicated calculation involved. While estimating this CX metric, you will require three numbers: the customers at the end of a period, those at the end, and new customers. Once you have all the necessary information, you can arrive at an accurate value.

Customer Journey Analytics

Another popular technique you can utilize to calculate the customer experience is analytics to understand the buyer’s journey. When you create a map of customers’ journeys, it derives details, such as their motivations, needs, and pain points. It also helps to understand the touch points you should evaluate throughout the buyer’s cycle. You can begin by procuring data from various sources, such as social media channels, websites, and events. What follows next is creating a page or tab on your customer journey map dedicated to reporting metrics of your touchpoints, allowing you to evaluate customer experience.

Summing up

The main goal of every business is to retain customers. Customer analytics offers a framework to evaluate client demands and implement actions accordingly. When you utilize the seven metrics, they help foster a customer-first mindset, allowing you to increase customer lifetime value. The analytics report reveals insights into different features of customer interactions and responses, helping you deliver the ideal solutions. They are essential to help you develop the right marketing strategies, promoting revenue growth, customer loyalty and retention, and increased brand awareness.

There’s a chasm between the CX brands deliver and what customers expect. Technology can bridge this gap.

The CX technology space is rapidly growing, and this acceleration is so fast-paced that in just four years, the industry grew from $471 Bn to $641 Bn in 2022. 

What does it mean for your business? What does it translate to in terms of growth and customer demands?

During such economic headwinds, business leaders must prioritize efforts that boost CLV. It’s time to get serious about customer experience technologies or risk becoming irrelevant.

A Part of The Picture

Many businesses have begun leveraging multiple technologies to enhance CX. However, integrating these solutions is the only way to derive maximum benefits and growth from your tech investments. Take stock of your current tech stack and gauge if you’re using any solution in isolation because if that’s the case, you’re not looking at CX from a holistic standpoint.

There has to be a strategy for each transformation initiative, and enabling powerful omnichannel customer experiences would need a CCaaS infrastructure. Pricing and product features don’t give businesses a competitive edge in today’s customer-driven world; CX does (A Gartner study found 81% of companies expect to compete on customer experience).

But even though the expectations seem to increase, the budgets aren’t. 

CX: From Good to Great

We all know that if customers enjoy doing business with you- they buy more, refer more, and tend to be more loyal even during market fluctuations or getting cheaper alternatives. They are even more comfortable trading their personal information for a better CX.

Understand what truly matters to your customers. Are they looking for agility, convenience, or just a human touch? Technology would help you understand your audience better and comprehend their likes, dislikes, goals & motivations.

Using the right technologies will make the experience more human and consistent for your customers. Prioritize solutions that deliver what customers expect the most. Using AI to create hyper-personalized, meaningful customer experiences will allow you to drive growth at scale.

Technology isn’t the goal

CX tech is booming and will continue to do so, but it is only a means to an end, not the end itself.

You need to prioritize CX in terms of people and goals. It starts with your culture and employees. How do they show up for the clients? How helpful and genuine are they in their interactions with the customer? Do your employees have adequate training to get the most out of tech and offer customers the speed and precision they demand?

Great CX begins with a great employee experience. Your client-facing teams can get the support they need from tech, but tech isn’t the only thing that makes CX great; people play a role just as important.

Rethinking CX requires marketing and tech leaders to reimagine tech and people. Align these two areas to create a sophisticated human-tech relationship and elevate CX.