Five Teams Who Can Increase Performance (and Revenue) through Customer Journey Mapping
Five Teams Who Can Increase Performance (and Revenue) through Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journey mapping - when done correctly - provides us with a clear and candid reflection of each customer's unique experience interacting with your product, brand and teams. The journey spans touchpoints owned by different functions: marketing campaigns, sales activity, product usage, support requests, finance milestones. Therefore, each business function within an organization can leverage the journey, not only to understand the interaction from its assets, but interactions across all functions. Below, find the five teams who can leverage the customer journey to do more for customers, and more for the bottom line of the business.
Marketing. Traditionally, marketers have used the funnel to label the phase of a customer's journey. While this author find the funnel to be insufficient for journey mapping, the goal of the funnel is sensible: use relevant content at each phase of the funnel to move customers to the next phase. Armed with a customer journey that describes various touchpoints, the marketer can engage the customer with the right content at the right time.
Product Design / UX. Data plays a large part in a designer's day job as they test changes within the product experience. Now imagine this: you have a pilot group using a new feature within your product. Aggregating the group's journeys and analyzing the conversion rates (how many customers followed the call to action) can provide designers with the data they need to validate previous assumptions.
Customer Support. By nature, the role of customer support is reactive: wait for a call or ticket to come in and then act on it. However, when the customer journey is researched prior to the first conversation, the customer feels appreciated and understood at the onset.
Product Management / Customer Success. Who's using the product? Who isn't? Why? All of this data starts with the data extracted from individual customer journey maps. The journey map provides product management a unique opportunity to segment its user base and make key decisions based on the data mined through the journey mapping exercise.
Sales. As a product person, I can usually tell the good salespeople from the bad. The good salesperson wants data around which customers are using the product and how they're using it. The bad salesperson needs my help on another demo because they don't really know how to sell the product.
A bad salesperson will sell a product, hand it over to account management and then wait for a renewal, upsell or cross-sell opportunity before engaging again. A good salesperson will keep close tabs on the onboarding of that customer and confirm that they're getting the value out of the product that they signed up for. It allows Sales to engage with customers early and intercept customer attrition and promote adoption. Most important, it makes renewal time much easier when you are confident that customers have embraced the technology sold to them.