The Blog

Journey maps

This is the last of four posts on the key attributes of customer loyalty.

If you want to successfully engage customers, or anyone else for that matter, it helps to have a model of what success looks like. This idea isn’t new. Elite athletes train themselves to see a perfect race in their mind’s eye, or to imagine the arc of a ball to its flawless conclusion. Scientists model physical and chemical reactions that occur at a scale too small to view directly. Business people use spreadsheets to specify business plans and they are really no more—and no less—than models for how a business operates and makes money. It is so common in fact that the business model is one of the most overused terms in business today.

But as good as we humans are at modeling, when it comes to the vendor-customer interaction we think we can wing it; but that’s a mistake. There are too many failure points for engaging customers, and too much is at stake, to wing it. We’ve all been customers and each of us has at some point had to convince others of our point of view and maybe we think that such modeling is just intuitive. But whether we make an explicit plan or simply go over what could happen in an interaction, we’ve modeled that moment and the quality of the modeling will help determine the success of the endeavor.

In the vendor-customer experience it’s best to plan things out concretely because people often act in unpredictable ways and it’s worthwhile to have some forethought about what to do next when things don’t go as expected in real time. If you look at customer sentiment sites and read descriptions of encounters that leave customers disappointed or even angry, you can’t help but notice that many of the stories involve things that went wrong that a vendor should have been able to predict—had there been a model to work from.

That’s what journey mapping is for and although we have been executing some forms of it for a long time, there’s now software that makes it all quick, easy, and accurate. There’s no longer an excuse for bad encounters where a vendor should have known. Moreover, in an era when we are letting machines take over some aspects of first customer encounters and triage for simple requests, it’s critical that we give our machines the ability to accurately carry out their tasks all the way to completion.

There’s nothing worse than a process that ends abruptly because no one thought the process would go that way. Journey maps help us discover all of the things that could go south and plan for how to prevent bad outcomes.

Journey maps have another, even greater, use. Once you have an accurate model of a customer journey you can develop metrics for key points in every process. Is a customer facing process taking too long? Where are the bottlenecks? Who are the customers most directly affected? How can we help the customer before he or she becomes frustrated and about to trash a vendor’s reputation? What is the effect of this frustration on customer retention?

You can quickly see that journey maps shouldn’t operate in a vacuum and that there are two key elements of the CRM suite that must be tightly interwoven. The first is, obviously, analytics. With modern metrics and analytics, a vendor can now easily manage by exception. If a small number of customers have trouble in a part of a process, analytics can help us determine which customers and pinpoint the processes so that no one reaches a dangerous frustration point. Ironically, sometimes even with the best intentions we develop metrics that we may think are important but that don’t enhance the journey.

The other interesting integration for journey maps is the application development and maintenance part of your platform. Ideally, a journey map should influence what code gets written; if your business process needs to branch, a good journey map should be able to drive that code generation. In this way, your customer-facing applications can always stay current with the processes that support your customers.

So that’s it, engaging customers and generating loyalty takes these four things: automation (but the right automation), proactive personalization, contextual interaction, and journey mapping. None of these is independent of the other three any more than peanut butter, jelly, and bread can lead separate lives on a plate. When we focus on engagement through this prism the result is customer loyalty, advocacy, and improved revenue. Customer loyalty is hard to get and it’s true, you can’t buy it, but if you know what you’re doing, you certainly can earn it.